AbiWord Roadmap


0.9/1.0 1.1/1.2 Unknown Future

AbiWord will be at version 0.9 when it has [substantially] all of the features we want in our "1.0" release. Accordingly, the list below represents our current plan for the "1.0" feature set. This list is still subject to a certain amount of change. However, most of the features that we want for 1.0, have been done.

Note that our target feature set for version 1.0 is very basic. "Version 1.0 is the beginning, not the end."

After sufficient bug fixing on the 0.9 code base, we'll call it 1.0.0 and consider it to be a maintenance tree. When we're ready to start adding post-1.0 features, we'll fork a new development tree for the 1.1/1.2 series releases.

User feedback from the 1.0 release will be used to determine priorities for the 1.2 release. The following list is extremely tentative right now.

We're not quite sure where these features go yet.


  • Features
  • Finish headers and footers
  • DLOG: File/Page Setup (aka Format/Section) (with page margins, size, orientation)
  • DLOG: Borders and Shading
  • DLOG: Styles
  • DLOG: Insert/Page Numbers
  • MacOS port (Hubert Figure)
  • Word 97 export (Dom Lachowicz)
  • Context menu for images
  • Context cursors for image
  • switch to UTF-8 encoding for internal piece table storage
  • Cleanup mapping of Unicode encodings to font encodings, focusing on: bullets, dashes, fancy quotation marks, symbols, dingbats
  • tables
  • import/export WordPerfect
  • image resize. Involves the addition of "handles" on the corners and edges of the image, when it's selected for resize. Requires mouse interaction and drag code. This should be possible to do entirely in XP code.
  • vertical keeps (partially done, in fb_ColumnBreaker.cpp)
  • horizontal keeps
  • Qt port, anyone? :-)
  • Inline marks for bookmarks, TOC, index, etc.
  • Calculation Editor
  • Database Integration
  • Gnome: Bonobo Integration
  • autosave
  • floats
  • improvements to RTF importer
  • Tip of the Day
  • print preview (zoom works as a nice substitute)
  • normal view
  • drop caps
  • paragraph borders and shading
  • footnotes
  • outline mode
  • decimal-aligned tabs
  • Table of contents
  • macros and scripting
  • Multilingual document support for Hebrew, Arabic
  • Background color
  • Threads

Notes