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The bottom line is it's nice to finally have a viable (and free!) solution to Word and Excel.

I think AbiWord and Gnumeric are quite nice. Why do you think the Google versions are more viable than these?

Gnumeric (spreadsheets), Abiword (word processing) and GnuCash (financing) are all excellent programs that the Gnome project collectively call Gnome Office. Anyone know if this is co-operative in any manner? ..good 'competition' to Open Office, even if they are not in the same class. It'd be great if these apps had a certain level of integration, although I can't think in what way off the top of my head.

I would like to see you try and develop any cross OS application in a compiled language!

>something a little less Micrsoft, a little more open, and a little less prone to exploits.

That would be nice, in the meantime you can use any of the bazillion apps that make .doc files. Need it in "word?" Fine. Here's abi-"word"

http://www.abisource.com/

Abiword, Gnumeric and hopefully sometime this decade, Criawips.

Hello! If you find documents that AbiWord can't open, and have a moment to spare to help us improve it, please file a bug at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ and attach the document (or the document with all personal information removed, or if it's confidential, it can be emailed to one of the devs after you file the bug). That way, AbiWord can be ready for your production use - it already is ready for production use for many people.

Hello! If you find documents that AbiWord can't open, and have a moment to spare to help us improve it, please file a bug at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ and attach the document (or the document with all personal information removed, or if it's confidential, it can be emailed to one of the devs after you file the bug). That way, AbiWord can be ready for your production use - it already is ready for production use for many people.

Hello! If you find documents that AbiWord can't open, and have a moment to spare to help us improve it, please file a bug at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ and attach the document (or the document with all personal information removed, or if it's confidential, it can be emailed to one of the devs after you file the bug). That way, AbiWord can be ready for your production use - it already is ready for production use for many people.

Thanks!

-- Ryan, AbiWord Win32 maintainer and developer

They know very well that KOffice, the Free & Open Source office suite that comes with the KDE desktop environment also supports the ODF format.

There's just one thing in Open Source projects that might hamper the argument. AbiWord, as I recall, uses its own format, and merely uses OpenDocument as a supplementary format because apparently OpenDocument may or may not fulfill the program's capabilities. The referenced post says something about suitability for serialising the internal state of the program, which would indicate there's internal stuff that can't be easily serialised; I also remember them claiming OpenDocument doesn't support everything AbiWord does. Yes, the exact same argument Microsoft uses.

And didn't they already, back in the day of the antitrust trial, try to present AbiWord as their direct competitor? "Look, people, our fiercest competitor since way back in 1990s can't use OpenDocument as a storage format to full extent, what makes you think we can?"

(The answer, of course, is that AbiWord does support natively ODF at least on import/export level - so should Microsoft...)

http://www.abisource.com/

And for those who only need a word processor, Abiword is much faster than OO.O and even a bit faster than Word. It's also GPL, and thereby /.-friendly.

That is because Ajax, which the Word Processor is based on, has to be "tweaked" for each web browser in order to work. First it is Mozilla Firefox, maybe next they will support Safari, Opera, IE 6.0, etc., but only after writing a modified version for those browsers and have the web site detect the browser type and load the correct Ajax script. I already had this discussion on the Microsoft Atlas story on the limits and compatability of Ajax and Javascripts.

As someone else noted, this is basically a Wordpad type replacement. No spell check, no grammar check, no advanced features that MS-Word users have relied on.

Corel Java Office was once in Beta testing, but Corel removed it. OpenOffice.org is written mostly in Java, but its Word Processing ability is a lot more advanced than AjaxWord.

If you want more than a Wordpad, and you don't mind downloading FOSS try AbiWord it can edit and write Word documents as well. It has been ported to Windows, Linux, OSX, etc. Unlike OO.org, it has a small footprint.

As some relative said, try Abiword.

Ahem...

Google Search for Open Source word Processor

Abiword for the lazy that does not want to look further.

http://www.abisource.com/

Sounds good. take a nice clean project like AbiWord that is insanely fast and stable and build from there.

It blows my mind how fast and stable that works is overlooked by many developers for the bloated feature-fest of other projects.

Come up woth a companion spreadsheet for Abiword that works on windows,OSX, BSD and linux and you will utterly kill OO.o simply because of speed and the fact it works.

many people claim that users WANT the added fluff in MS office and OO.o has. yet 90% of the time I hear people bitch about how all that added crap only get's in the way like the autoformatting and autospellcorrection, etc... AS well as 60% of the users do not use the other cruft in there.

why cant the "features" be plug-in's? so if someone does not want them they do not have to have them?

I love OO.o but it's absolutely redicilous that I need a P4 1.8ghz machine to run a stupid word processor in a speedy manner. OO.o and MS office is 100% useless on a P-III 900 machine with a tiny 512 meg of ram. or a G3-600 with more ram.

that is completely redicilous and the developers should be ashamed of that.

If the MS Office model is so flawed, then why does every open source office application look exactly like its Microsoft counterpart?

No, they don't. Have, for instance, a look at Gnumeric. It offers features currently not present in Excel.

OOo is mainly an MS Office clone. Innovation happens in independent projects like Gnumeric, AbiWord, etc.

I understand that you're talking about preloaded software, but remember that you can run Abiword or the X11 version of OpenOffice. I'd wager that most software for Linux one can get precompiled for OS X, but that most OS X software isn't available for Linux.

Note that I disagree with your central point concerning the appropriateness of Linux for the project. But I think you underestimate the range of OS X software available.

One solution (somewhat) has been http://wikipedia.com/. I know this is not a dictionary but works if you need to double check a spelling, but mainly I have found it useful while writing scientific pieces to double check a few pathways or cell types.

Okay, let's see...

There's AbiWord. I wasn't real impressed, but you could try that out. Also check out Mariner Write, Z-Write, and, of course, NisusWriter. You might also check out ThinkFree Office.

Try checking out the Macintosh Products Guide for more information.

With a plugin architecture, it shouldn't be hard to have a small but functional installer that downloads all the bells and whistles the user wants, but only after it knows what the user wants.

With a plugin architecture, it shouldn't be hard to have a small but functional installer that downloads all the bells and whistles the user wants, but only after it knows what the user wants.

In my day we used Symantec GreatWorks. It fit on a floppy disk and only took up 4 MB of RAM. Of course, that was all the RAM we had back then, and roughly 1/20th of your hard drive. And it even had Kermit. Can MS Office do Kermit?

A modern equivalent would take up 1 GB of RAM and about 4 GB of Hard Disk Space. And it still probably wouldn't do Kermit.

Your mother in law paid cash for a copy of MS Office, yet is still using Dial-Up AOL? A standard-edition copy will fund the difference between AOL and a real internet connection for two years. Save some cash with VOIP and it pays for itself.

If you don't want to download 80 MB, try Ability Office, Abi Word, Atlantis, or the 602 suite.

Honestly, though, a real connection is worth the cash. 80MB is not that large... OO would be best served by looking into the other problems it has. After all, your mother in law did get the download fully, but she didn't like it. Let's work on making her like it.

• Scientific Workplace (proprietary, win32 only
• LyX (F/OSS)
• TeXmacs (F/OSS)
• AbiWord (F/OSS, not the best TeX editor (but I had none of the problems you had))

One suggestion is to AbiWord 2.4 on the command line. It's as simple as:

AbiWord --to=doc foo.odt
AbiWord --to=odt foo.doc

The Link-Grammar team is separate from the AbiWord team... Link-grammar is a university-sponsored research project that was licensed such that we were able could incorporate it into AbiWord 2.4. Their design decisions, not ours. :)

Bug reports are always welcome: http://bugzilla.abisource.com/

Our Mac version is admittedly a little shakier than our Linux and Windows versions, but import/export should be ok. If you've found a reproducable crash, please let us know at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ , preferably with a sample document, so that we can fix the problem you are having.

Thanks for trying AbiWord and helping us out!

Hopefully it will arrive soon on your preferred OS distributions - Ubuntu (breezy/5.10) and Fedora-extras already have it. Enjoy!

Oh, and by the way, if it ever does crash, please let us know at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/

Thanks!

Stop by http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ and file a bug, making sure to tell us your distribution. Or, just pop by our IRC channel or user mailing list, and we'll do our best to help you out there.

What distribution do you use? The latest AbiWord is in Ubuntu 5.10, and should be hitting Debian Testing quite soon (within a day or two). These are ideal solutions. If you are not using one of these distros, please file a bug at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ about the AutoPackage, and we'll see what we can do.

Thanks for the compliment! However, since you posted AC on Slashdot, the chance of the mysterious "Format Paragraph" bug you mention getting fixed is even lower that if it were posted and modded up, and far, far lower than if you put it on our bugzilla :D. http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ - Please report any bugs you find so that we can fix them!

Thanks for using AbiWord!

So I guess the answer is yes & no, Their are plans to support it with a plugin (like other plugin file filters word etc.), but no plans for making it the default. So it's really not clear if they will support it well or anytime soon.

Spell checker? That would need a grammar checker as both lose and loose could be correct depending on context. Compared to some of the other rediculous (sic) spelling mistakes on Slashdot it is no big deal to mix up lose and loose, it could even have been a typo.

At the bottom of the downloads page, there's a "binaries" section, with a link to RPMs, Debian packages, Irix binaries, and a site with Windows Binaries. That's why I said that it runs on all platforms that matter. Never mind that it's entirely within the realm of the possible to get a rootless X server running on Win32 through Cygwin, or that I've run Photoshop under Wine for several years while many others use it on a Mac (I've also run Dia on OS X, yay Fink).

But hey, this is slashdot. Reading the post or looking at the links == bad, not realizing that lots of GTK programs work just fine on Windows (including Dia, Abiword, the Gimp, and Glade), many with nice little clicky installers == good.

And yes, Linux is good and Microsoft is evil. In general. :)

I've been using Linux for many years, and the problem of obtaining software packages drives me to the end of my nerves.

Hmmm, what packages are you trying to install? I usually only have that problem if the software is still in CVS or something. But even then, Gentoo still usually packages it. I do have problems when I use Fedora. Not sure why they don't have a lot of packages, but it is hard to find stuff sometimes. With Debian, though, almost never a problem. In any case, Autopackage is supposed to solve this problem. It actually looks pretty neat, but I am waiting for local packaging system integration. Then it will just be a matter of convincing developers to use it. Some projects, like Abiword, already are.

Trademarks aren't new to FOSS, and I can't imagine the Linux trademark being restricted as severly as the Mozilla or AbiWord ones:

If an individual or organization is creating a Community Edition of Mozilla Firefox or Thunderbird, it must use the names "Firefox Community Edition" or "Thunderbird Community Edition" to identify this software. Mozilla Community Edition Policy

... AbiSource freely licenses the use of certain of its trademarks solely in combination with the suffix "Personal" when applied to derivative works based on an AbiSource GPL product. Thus, for example, you are free to use the mark "AbiWord Personal" in connection with derivative works that are based on "AbiWord". AbiWord Trademark Usage Guidelines

(These are the only cases automatically allowed, other use requires explicit permission.)

(Unlikely IMHO) worst case scenario if "Linux" were trademarked:
Debian and Fedora are based on Linux®. "Linux" is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.
People would still call them Linux anyway, it wouldn't be the end of the world.

I do think that it might make things easier to automatically allow any person, company or organisation to use the trademark prefixed by their own name for derivitive works, e.g. "Debian Mozilla", "Debian AbiWord" for Debian's versions of each. That would make things clear enough, I think.

However, for anyone who's in favour of unrestricted usage of "Linux" (or any other FOSS name), consider Sys-Con Media and their LinuxWorld magazine (Slashdot story). It's lucky that the editorial staff were willing to put their jobs on the line to do something about it.

Hi everyone, AbiWord-2.4, due any day now, will come with an integrated version of open-source grammar checker link-grammar. You download a beta version now. As usual it is available for Linux, Macs and Windows.

There is one. The Link Grammar tool is a research project that performs English grammar checking. Recently, the AbiWord folks built a plugin for grammar checking which uses Link Grammar that highlights phrases with questionable grammar with green squiggly lines. It isn't perfect, but it definitely works, and works now. The 2.3 development series of AbiWord currently is the only one with this plugin, however, the 2.4 release is weeks away, and 2.3.x is quite stable. For those of you who don't know, AbiWord is a free/open source (GPL) word processor that is full-featured but fast. It runs on Windows, Linux (GTK+ and GNOME versions), and Mac OS X, as well as a new port to the Nokia 770 which is under development by INDt, a Nokia research lab. You can get it here: http://abisource.com/

Full Disclosure - I help out with AbiWord, as the Windows packager for 2.3 and 2.4, as well as some other random things. I started helping because it works great for me, though.

Will there be any merger or code share between Gnome Office and Open office?
http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/
http://www.abisource.com/

I just add a bit on that list from top of my head.
Although I think the listed app goes beyond what the so called 'average pc user' wants, but there goes...

1. Konqueror ( http://www.konqueror.org/ )

2. Email - Sylpheed ( http://sylpheed.good-day.net/ )

3. I think Evolution is more like in this place.

4. Lately "Sound Juicer" is taking more attention too

5. VideoLAN aka VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/ ) and Ogle ( http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/ ) [and Goggles ( http://www.fifthplanet.net/goggles.html ) for Ogle GUI wrapper] for DVD watching.

6. There are plenty way to do this, but the typical ones could be 'Jinzora' ( http://www.jinzora.org/ ) and 'MusicPD' ( http://www.mpd.org/ ), even plain Apache does it fine too, in a way.

8. If you want easier to manage iptables wrapper, Shorewall ( http://www.shorewall.net/ ) and there are other wrappers too.

9. KOffice ( http://www.koffice.org/ ) and by individual components, Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ ), Gnumeric ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/ ), Gnucash ( http://www.gnucash.org/ )

10. Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) or Sodipodi ( http://www.sodipodi.com/ ) for vector graphics.

11. Miranda ( http://miranda-im.org/ ). Windows only.

13. Hmm , Samba? ( http://www.samba.org/ ), WedDAV (Look parent post), FTP (plenty ftp daemons, ex : http://www.proftpd.org/, http://vsftpd.beasts.org/ etc)

16. GPhoto ( http://www.gphoto.org/ ), EOG ( http://www.gnome.org/ ? ), GQView ( http://gqview.sourceforge.net/ ). The latters are for just viewing mainly.

20. FreeNX ( http://www.nomachine.com/ , http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) http://www.poptop.org/ ), L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tpd ), RP-L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/rp-l2tp/ )

24. Postfix ( http://www.postfix.org/ ), Sendmail ( http://www.sendmail.org/ ), Exim ( http://www.exim.org/ ), Cyrus ( http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/ ), Xmail ( http://www.xmailserver.org/ ), qmail ( http://www.qmail.org/ )

25. Spamassassin ( http://spamassassin.apache.org/ )

26. Same as above.

27. XSane ( http://www.xsane.org/ ) for sane frontends.

30. Buzzmachines ( http://www.buzzmachines.com/ ) I could be wrong...

31. 'various GUI frontends' - X CD Roast ( http://www.xcdroast.org/ ), K3B ( http://k3b.sourceforge.net/ )

32. Don't know any opensource ones...

I'd recommend using the CVS version of AbiWord. It'll preserve almost all of your visual and semantic meaning using XHTML and CSS. This includes fairly complex things like endnotes, footnotes, tables, floating text boxes, etc.

AbiWord --to=file.html file.doc

http://www.abisource.com/

http://www.abisource.com/

Completely free and open, and using native widgets and updated constantly. Granted, it's only a word processor, but that's all I've noticed being talked about in this /. discussion anyway. If you're going to do serious spreadsheet work, for example. you *will* need Excel -- it's actually really not that bad.

-o

Though it's still only alpha or beta quality it does does a WikiPedia-lookup plugin that works rather well.

http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/Pl uginMatrix

Currently we run on most UNIX systems, Windows 95 and later, QNX Neutrino 6.2. We also have a MacOS X native port in the way (you can still use the UNIX version on MacOS X if you want). There used to be a BeOS port, but that version has been unmaintained for too long to consider it as still alive.

Thanks for the kind words, but it's not all true (yet?).
OOo writer surely has way more features than AbiWord does, but yes, many people are using AbiWord as part of their day to day work and prefer it over OO.
Also there are crashers left in our bugzilla, but we're busy closing them for our upcoming 2.4 release.

Rob
http://www.abisource.com/~rob/

As Morten points out, their spreadsheet documentation is insufficient to build an implementation around.

However, the Nokia Maemo team will be helping AbiWord and Gnumeric improve their ODT import/export support[1]. For what it's worth, when I've been working on the SXW/ODT import/export in AbiWord, I only sparingly use the official specification, as it's too large and cumbersome to be of great use. It's so much easier to create interesting test cases and map those back to AbiWord's semantics. I imagine that the Nokia guys will be doing something similar when they add better ODT support in Gnumeric.

[1] http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/ 2005/Jun/0276.html

Go ahead and get the mac. Neoffice works quite well, has done for some time. Only if your work is centered on MS VB stuff or really heavy duty excel sheets are you in a pickle. Don't forget that if word compatibilty is your main issue then you can also go for Abiword

And don't tell us that being able to create pdf's and swf's make OpenOffice superiour to MS Office; Open Office has a hefty wodge of features that aren't suited to document editing and are out of place. You can't really compare Open Office's capabilities to MS Office since it does so many things that it shouldn't be doing; at the most they should be optional add-ons.

I've had the displeasure of using OpenOffice for some time now, and I yearn to return to MS Office which due to circumstances I can't. And no, I'm not trolling: this is months of hard labour talking.

Which reminds me: its time to re-visit AbiWord and see if its ready for prime-time yet....

Becuase it is easy to replace it with better faster (java is slow... you have to load the VM it's just not as fast as C I don't care what you java fanboys say)

MS word replacement:
abiword (cross platform OSX win32 linux etc...)
http://www.abisource.com/download/index.phtml

excel replacement:

Gnumeric (cross platform linux win32... not sure if it works with OSX)
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/downloads.s html

Yes and no. I got a little excited about the OASIS format a few months ago, and I love Abiword, so I picked through the archives fairly thoroughly.

As I read more I began to agree with them. One of the main concerns is compatibility. At this point in time, that means compatibility with Word. RTF is much better suited for that. The RTF spec is available, and RTF is fairly well supported in most programs (WordPerfect, OpenOffice.org, Ted, etc.) so it is the better choice to focus on for compatibility right now.

That said, they would love to have good support for OASIS. The current OpenOffice.org import/export plugin needs a lot of love. It was written several years ago and never worked really spectacularly. If anyone is willing to hack on it (or rewrite it) and help make it better we would be ecstatic. Really. Send a message to the developers list and they'll point you in the right direction (probably to the OpenOffice Writer Filter plugin in CVS). Add constructive comments or patches to the bug report. Stop by on IRC (#abiword on irc.gnome.org) and ask for pointers where to get started.

Alternatively, if anyone is willing to sponsor (pay) one of the developers to implement this feature they would be more than willing to do so. Offer up a bounty or something like that. I've thought about chipping in (financially) on such an effort.

Abiword can support OASIS. This would help make it a true standard and a viable alternative to RTF and DOC files. But they do need some help to do so.