Basic JWord ideas

This page is a focal point for ideas about JWord, the slow-developing basic word processor intended to be part of the JFA collection of programs.

I am currently working on "jword2", the second generation of the project. The first generation was very very basic. This version will be more interesting.

Feature list

I'm shooting for the following features to be supported by jword2:

Embedded graphics
Different colored text
Justification (left,center,right)
Column support
Highlighting, and cut/copy/paste
Save/Load in some "native" format
[MAYBE tables]
[MAYBE save/load of some non-native format: subset of rtf of html?]

As you can see by the above screenshot, I sort of have the underpinnings of more than half of the layout stuff already. Now I have to scratch my head and think about how to best handle the user interface to all this. It's somewhat tricky.

Coding notes

Originally, I was going to try to make this second version be a three-layer affair: Independant GUI, text layer, and file IO layer. The reason was to allow separate GUI layers [AWT, Swing, who-knows-what]

I am now simplifing things to just GUI+text vs file IO, so I'll actually complete this round :-/ But I'm still trying to keep things relatively modular so that different front ends wont be too difficult in the future. I'm also trying to provide a fairly generic "rendering engine" that would be suitable for use in a java browser.

For a small feel of the code, here's some Interface code to look at. These interfaces handle file format translation.

Preliminary DocInterface definition.
(Interface used to transfer a document between different objects/formats. It needs to be expanded for jword2)
Sample of using DocInterface to read text
Sample of using DocInterface to write text

Volunteers

If you are someone who is

already somewhat experienced with java programming
writes readable code
has both the time, and inclination to WRITE CODE, NOW

Please send an email to phil@bolthole.com and say you are interested in working on Jword.

In particular, I'm looking for people who have a "favourite file format" that they want to implement support for. The obvious formats we need support for:

microsoft word (any version)
word perfect?
HTML (pick an older version to go easy on yourself!)
RTF format (USA archive) (European-France archive)

Why am I working on this?

Because the world deserves a truely crossplatform word processor

Because they said "it cant be done in Java"

Because I like programming in java

Because it will eventually be one of the few WPs to handle different input methods, and completely non-western fonts. I DO plan to eventually support Hebrew and Japanese display "properly".

For other projects that Phil is involved with, you should check out the top level of "bolthole.com"

In fact, Phil is kinda spread rather thin these days. So any encouraging email is appreciated. Noone else is currently known to be writing code on it, and I'm spending most of my spare time on some of my other programs, recently.