I want to inform the NetBSD package maintainers that they should continue to use Ted 2.14. The current version of Ted (2.16) has some unfortunate bugs.

1) Ted-2.16 has a partially implemented feature for lists and bulleted enteries. This causes problems when editing *.rtf documents created in Microsoft word. If the typist attempts to add text after a section that contains the list, then there is no way to turn the list feature off. All the subsequent sentences will be list items or bulleted.
 In early April, Ted 2.15  was released and it was discovered that there was a bad bug in it's tables. Mark promptly fixed the bug and released Ted-2.16. After that was released, I and another tester found problems with the bulleted lists, that were created in Microsft word. Mark simply could not devote any more time to Ted at that point. He had already taken off from work to address some of the problems and could not spare any more time. So the numbered lists will have to wait for a future release. 

2) Deleting a portion of text that contains a footnote or endnote and then pasting the same section of text back in will cause Ted-2.16 to crash. This can happen if the typist cuts a portion of the document out and then realizes that he or she did not want to do that and promptly attempts to paste it back in again. 

 I and some other friends will meet on June 7th to test the version of Ted that has these problems corrected. As of right now, Mark de Does, the developer, is working with another open source tester in an attempt to iorn out these bugs. I will get a new tarball this weekend from Mark.

 I am happy to report that Ted-2.16 does configure and compile without difficulty, on NetBSD. The former problems with NetBSD builds were:

A) Clicking  on  Format -> Format Tool -> Page Layout, Produced "Apply to Document" where it should say "Apply to Section". This is now fixed. It was a bug that only happened in NetBSD.

B) The include files were not found during compiliation. Jeremy Reed had a fix for this. Namely appending -Wl -R/usr/X11R6/lib, to line 38, of Ted/makefile.in. The current version no longer requires this modification and should compile without difficulty on NetBSD.

 Many of these problems have happend because Ted was originally a quick hack to produce an *.rtf editor similar to Microsoft Notepad. As Ted evolved to become a more full featured word processor, including footnotes and tables, the existing code was not sufficient to support those features. Mark began a major revision of that code in early February and as a result the bullets/lists feature implementation was delayed.

 The future version of Ted will have a redesigned toolbar using icons and layout similar to Abiword. I hope to post sketches of those in the future so that NetBSD users can comment/suggest changes. My own hope is that this little word processor will use the guidelines of freedesktop.org in it's design. I think freedsektop.org has a lot to offer.

 Here is Mark's description of what he wants implemented in Ted (excerpted from an e-mail he sent me):
From Mark de Does:
Did I ever tell you about my final plan with Ted? It is the following:
-  Polishing of existing features.
-  Numbered lists
-  Table of contents.
-  Literature. (Is this part of RTF?)
-  Index?
-  Undo.
On one hand, I am side-tracking all the time because of user
requests, on the other hand that is where I want to go:
A simple word processor that is sufficient for simple reports.
You may notice that lists and undo are the main subjects left
over.