With the help of Marc Maurer, I have abstracted the AbiWord WordPerfect filter into a general library for importing and exporting WordPerfect files: libwpd. libwpd will be used in AbiWord, OpenOffice (probably as an external component), and KWord (maybe, probably, hopefully).
I also wrote an ooWriter filter. This was way more difficult than it should have been (the filter itself is only about 2000 lines of code, most of it completely generic and non-OpenOffice specific). All the information necessary is out there, but it's scattered about in the hard-to-find API docs, mailing-list lore, and half-assed, incomplete, barely relevant examples. To say nothing of the process of building OpenOffice itself.
On the other hand, the engineers at Sun and Ximian were wonderfully helpful whenever I asked questions/had problems. So it's not all bad. Maybe things will get better with time.
I'm writing up some documentation on filter/component writing for OpenOffice, which should help those who follow in my footsteps. You can find it at Ximian's OpenOffice Pages.
Doing some hefty refactoring. Redid the statusbar to use native widgets (leaving the XP code only the task of handling the model) a few weeks, currently refactoring the frame code. First cut has been committed, awaiting work from Win32/QNX maintainers to bring their platforms into line. Anticipated results: cleaner seperation of model/view, elimination of several thousand lines of duplicated code in the platform-specific frontends, less bugs, easier to cleanly implement new features. All quite satisfying, I must say.
In general, I've been quite psyched about AbiWord lately. The latest versions of CVS are cleaner/better than ever before. And it looks damn sexy. Yes, I think it might just have a future, even in the wake of OpenOffice's rise to glory. Maybe I will write more about this some other time.
I learned the letter keybindings and a bunch of other stuff that I had not yet bothered learning. Still probably using about 10% of the features I could/should be using for editing code, but I am now at least one step closer to being unstoppable. Anyone know of a good, advanced Emacs/XEmacs tutorial?
Life..
.. could be better. Still haven't found a job, feeling rather lonely in this new city (most of my friends from university are still in Toronto). And that's only half the story.. all I can do is be thankful for new, small comforts from the British: the band that is New Order (Power, Corruption, and Lies) and the writer that is Will Self (The Quantity Theory of Insanity).
Et j'ai amélioré mon français. C'est pas mal ça.