[odf-discuss] ODF Viewer Update: Beta 1 released.

[Daniel Carrera]

Hello everyone,

The long-awaited update to the Fellowship's OpenDocument viewer is now
ready for your downloading pleasure. I am pleased to announce the
release of the first beta release of the viewer. A quick summary:

* Summary:
  The viewer is looking great. It is perfectly usable for general users.
It feels fairly polished and complete but with just a simple UI. Users
and developers should find it useful as it is. Download from:
http://opendocumentfellowship.org/development/projects/odfviewer

* Format support.
  Thanks to the fantastic work of Roman Fordinal and Eugene Prigorodov,
the viewer now supports OpenDocument presentations and spreadsheets.
While work on these formats is on-going, I think you will be pleased
with the current status.

  Spreadsheets: Support is solid. Almost everything should work except:
shadows, vertical text, DataPilot tables and default column cell styles.

  Presentations: Support is solid BUT there is a bug in OOo which makes
it save the wrong background colour on slides. *We* implement the
feature correctly, OOo doesn't. We've filed a bug report:
  http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=72134
  Please vote for this bug.
  If it looks like OOo won't fix this bug soon, we can add a simple
patch to make the viewer deal with the OOo bug, but we want to avoid
that if possible.

* Viewer UI:
  Thanks to the work of Alex Hudson and a few minor bits from your
humble servant the viewer now has a more polished feel. It includes a
proper search function, document properties, print preview and text size
scaling. One feature that developers will love is "view ODF source".

* Plan for 1.0:
  Format support is on-going. As for the UI, we are not yet at a UI
freeze, but we will not implement new major features before the 1.0
release. There's much bug-fixing to do, and we'd like to add a "save a
copy" feature.
  I really hope to figure out how to make the 'About' function appear in
the conventional place for Mac applications, but I've had no luck so
far. This may be a problem without a solution.

* When will 1.0 be ready?
  Sadly, not this year. There is enough work to do that I believe we
should have at least one more beta and maybe two before the first
Release Candidate.

* Postponed features:
  Sadly, tabbed browsing will _not_ feature in the first major release.
It's not that it can't be done. It's just that we're busy working on
things that are more important. Ditto for supporting "track changes".
  In a future release we could also trim down xulrunner to reduce the
download size. But we will not do that for this release.

Cheers,
Daniel.
-- 
"I AM in shape. Round IS a shape."
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