The Whole is Less than the Sum of the Parts

We have been talking about making some changes to the AbiWord piece table for a while now, and so in the past week, I have decided to start some hacking.

There are two separate, and largely orthogonal, issues that impact the perfromance of the PT. The first has to do with the way the pieces are stored — we use a double-linked list, which does not scale well to very large documents. The second has to the with the handling of text attributes and properties; because the attributes are internally represented by strings, we happen to make a large number of calls to strcmp(), and also have to constantly validate pointers that are being passed around. It is the second issue that I have decide to start tackling. Read the rest »

Will need to have a look at this (BSD-licenced) project if it could give us a way to support AbiWord files in Word, or at help with improving our Word importer.