Been a while since I've posted an entry. Nothing really too exciting in the interim to report-- just more of the same. More work on AbiWord's WordPerfect import; modified it to use a function table, that led to cleaner code, which in turn led me to start working on more involved issues. That is, handling embedded images, handling font changes.

All in all then, it's fairly clear what needs to be done for AbiWord's WordPerfect import. I need to match up information stored in the document-header with information stored in the document-body. It's just a matter of getting the time together to work on this. Something which seems to be in short supply as of late, with the start of school. I could probably keep myself very busy simply keeping up with my coursework. But hey, why let all this deter me from tackling yet another project? Nothing like diffusing your energy in as many directions as possible!

Which leads me to the other part of my coding adventures. I volunteered to port my vrml/iv importer to the Lodestone framework, which I alluded to earlier. Enthusiasm for the project seems to have died; at least judging by the activity on Lodestone-Devel (of course the recent tragedy in N.Y. + D.C. may be the proper explanation for this). I'm hoping that an actual implementation might restimulate interest in the project.

I really like the idea behind Lodestone, both in a practical sense (it does something useful) and its implications for the broader graphics programming community. My hope is that Lodestone might be a start at providing a new, standardized way at solving some of the "default" problems in 3d graphics programming. That is, if Lodestone's architecture proves flexible enough to be extended for a wide variety of applications (a point on which I'm not entirely convinced).

One worry that I have is that even if "Lodestone" does successfully fill its niche, it won't be well received. "NOT INVENTED HERE" is, unfortunately, an all too common attitude among graphics programmers. Witness the proliferation of scene-graph/3d-engine projects on sourceforge.

But that's no reason to give up before trying. I just hope that "trying" won't stop me from hitting the other cylinders in my life..