Dare to Dream?

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Doh! I’m so sorry, I mistook 2.4.6 as 2.6 version. 2.4.x series had no support for Indic languages. I’ll update my testing again for version 2.5.1 (devel) and blog again about my findings. This post should aint be of any good use. Sorry again.

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Some days ago, I had responded on one of the Abiword blogs (msevior) that I was interetsed in testing the new Abiword release - 2.6.0 for Indic i18n. And today, after almost two weeks, I managed to get 2 free hours, after having a turbo charged “Exotica” pizza from Pizza Hut [Who says caffiene stimulates your nervous system! Pizza does it equally well - probably better!]

Abiword seems pretty nicely designed, but had some issues with rendering. I tested Abiword on following three aspects

• Rendering
• Inputting text
• Printing

Though printing & inputting Indic text worked as expected, rendering Indic text was my major concern. The first & most critical problem I found was that for indic text to be visible, the text had to be marked with the corresponding Indic font, otherwise the text would appear as circles! & the reverse was also equally frightening - if you type text with a hindi font (say Lohit Hindi) and SCIM is not activated, ie - the input is in plain english, the text is rendered as square boxes instead of plain english text. I think there’s some serious problem with the way Abiword uses fallback font or does font selection.

Other issues included ability to add more vovels to an existing vovel, giving something like this…

Another screenshot of interest - http://bugzilla.abisource.com/attachment.cgi?id=4113

Here is a complete bug list
10812 - Abiword does not selects font automatically according to …
10813 - Unable to render complex indic characters
10814 - Typing english text when indic font is selected, gives sq…
10815 - Unable to render ZWNJ properly
10816 - Vovels are not rendered properly for indic scripts.
10817 - Preedit window is randomply placed on the screen
10818 - Abiword cannot print when indic text is written, but corr…

Apart from this, I also found two very interesting things in Abiword.

1. The right click menu in text area gives an option to select the Input Method Engine (IME)- which is very very nice as compared to OO.writer - for which if the IME does not works, you cannot tell if it started or not or was there any other problem or that is GTK_IM_MODULE variable is set or not!
2. Abiword uses a preedit window to display the preedit text - as compared to the underlined text which is displayed by GTK+ apps.

With this, they have managed to escape preedit replication problems like Bug 166231 and Bug 199551, but got caught in a problem of preedit window placement - which currently seemed very random (unlike at the bottom of preedit string everytime in Gedit).

But all this being said, Abiword seems to be a very nice app, had very fast responses & has the ability to be ported to embedded devics like N800 maybe [wink]

…looking forward to use Abiword on my N800