This page is now here for historic purposes. Please visit
http://www.gnumeric.org for
the current home page of gnumeric.
The Gnumeric spreadsheet
The Gnumeric spreadsheet is part of the GNOME
desktop environment: a project to create a user friendly free desktop environment.
As every other component of GNOME, Gnumeric is free
software and it is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL.
Gnumeric is intended to be a replacement for a commercial spreadsheet,
so a lot of effort and work has still to go into it, but I believe we have
the right framework to do it.
In the future, I would like to add support for Guile modules, as well as
using the Guile computation engine for the native number formats in Gnumeric
(which would give us arbitrary precision integers, and support for precise
and imprecise numbers as well as other goodies).
Printing is going to be achieved by the GNOME printing framework which
is being designed right now by Raph Levien.
Read the README and the Future-Roadmap files included with Gnumeric
to learn more about our plans with Gnumeric.
Graphics in Gnumeric will be implemented by using the
GUPPI plotting engine through CORBA and the
Bonobo infrastructure.
Michael Meeks and Bruno Unna have been working on Excel import code. Talk to them
if you are interested in helping the project.
As part of the GNOME desktop, Gnumeric will be using the ORBit
CORBA implementation to expose its services to the world and it will be
a Bonobo component (Bonobo is the compound document architecture of GNOME).
Gnumeric has a plugin system based on shared libraries right now (which
means that all plugins right now fall under the GNU GPL). A plugin exists
for defining your own functions in Python.
Part of this CORBA integration will enable people to write non-GPL plugins
(I understand this is something some people might want to do, and for them,
the CORBA-based plugin architecture will fit their needs). This is not
yet implemented, but will soon be.
The Gnumeric mailing list can be reached at [email protected].
If you want to subscribe to the mailing list, send mail to:
[email protected]
and in the body of your message put the word "subscribe".
As with any other software in GNOME, you can fetch the latest development
version of Gnumeric from the GNOME
Anonymous CVS and from the GNOME CVS from the module "gnumeric".
To compile Gnumeric you will need the gnome-libs package and the gnome-xml
package. The gnome-libs package in turn requires glib, gtk+ and the imlib
packages.
Tom Miller at XESS for helping me
understand various spreadsheet issues and making the source code for
his first spreadsheet program available to me for study.
Gnumeric has been coded mainly by Miguel de Icaza, with help from
other intrepid hackers that have contributed code, bug fixes and
documentation:
- Daniel Veillard (XML file load/save support).
- Tom Dyas (Plugin setup, Python plugin).
- Michael Meeks and Bruno Unna (Excel file loading code).
- Jakub Jelinek (new scrolling engine)
- Chris Lahey (number formatting engine).
- Adrian Likins (manual, online help).
- Mark Probst (Guile plugin).
- Federico Mena (canvas support).
- Morten Welinder (lots of fixes and code auditing).
- Vincent Renardias (internationalization issues).
- Erik Troan (assorted bug fixes).
- Donnie Barnes (docs, bug fixes).
Many other people have contributed ideas and translations of Gnumeric to other
languages.
Return to GNU's home page.
Please send FSF & GNU inquiries & questions to
[email protected].
There are also other ways to
contact the FSF.
Please send comments on these web pages to
[email protected],
send other questions to
[email protected].
Copyright (C) 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is
permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
Updated:
20 Nov 2000 paulv
