Slashdot Mirror

At the risk of sounding like a spokesman, if you think OpenOffice takes a while to load up (it *can* be kinda slow at times) or you don't like the various releases of Word, you can always use Abiword.

It is quite lightweight (only needs a 486 and 16mb of RAM to run) despite looking very similar in style and operation to the latest versions of both OOo and MS Word. It's also compatible with both Word and OOo, and supports many other formats both internally and via plugins, such as WordPerfect etc.

Personally, I have OOo and Abiword installed, so that I can use Abiword for word processing, and OOo for spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations whenever I need to. I also run Abiword on my old 300MHz laptop, and it runs with no lag whatsoever, unlike when I tried running OOo on it.

Have you tried Abiword?

Small, fast, light and with spellcheck. Will let you save as .doc also, which lets me print out all my papers at school wheer they only have windos and mac boxes.

Bugzilla

Nice idea; please file it.

I think that if they did want to develop an office suite, then I don't think that they would choose OpenOffice (just like they didn't build Safari on Mozilla).

As other posters have mentioned, they are a number of FOSS competitors to MS Office - my personal favourite Word replacement is AbiWord (the native OS X is not yet in "stable" - but it does look very encouraging)

By the way, if you want an example of what I think is a cross-platform GUI app done right, look at AbiWord. The core engine is the same on all platforms, but the GUI part is implemented on each of them seperately.

Now, you might say that this is obviously the right approach, but AbiWord is one of the few applications I know uses it.

• Abiword - Word processor, supports .doc, .rtf, GPL.
• Open Office - Whole Office suite, including a database frontend and BASIC macro language.
• Perl - Scripting language
• Python - Scripting language
• Cygwin - UNIX emulator. Can create Windows programs, reliant on a cygwin1.dll.
• MinGW - Port of some of the UNIX utilities (BASH, gcc, vi...) to Windows.
• djgpp - UNIX emulator for DOS.
• Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird - Web browser, e-mail client, IRC client, lots more.
• Filezilla - FTP client.
• xchat - IRC client.
• putty, pscp, psftp and others - Telnet/SSH clients.
• Gaim - Client for IRC/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ/AIM and more.
• gzip - Compression (usually better than .zip).
• tar - Extracts/Makes tar archives.
• bzip2 - Totally ace compression (usually better than gzip).
• Info-ZIP - Support for .zip. Good free substitute for Winzip.
• 7-zip - Support for multiple compression formats.
• frhed - Hex editor
• Ext2fs - Several programs for doing Ext2 under Windows.
• Antiword - Converts documents out of the proprietary .doc format.
• MySQL - RDBMS.
• Apache - Web/Proxy server
• sendmail - Mail server
• squid - Proxy server
• freeamp - Audio player
• winlame - MP3 encoder
• cd-ex - MP3/OGG encoder?
• gimp - Very detailed graphics program.
• imagemagick - Graphic manipulation. Provides the 'convert' utility under UNIX.
• freeciv - Civilisation clone.
• gnuplot - Plotting package.
• TightVNC - A fork of VNC, with enhancements.
• RealVNC - The original VNC.
• rdesktop - Access Windows Terminal Services and Remote Desktops.
• Nmap - Well known port scanner.
• John the Ripper - Password cracker. Does NT and MD5.

"How is the ms office compatability. Currently my school wants assignments in a word .doc format."

"AbiWord cannot export Microsoft Word documents at the moment; you should use RTF (see below) for sending files to people who use Word." File format FAQ

"Rich Text Format, or RTF, is a file format that contains all the formatting information about your file, and which can be read by almost all word processors. This is the format you should use if you need to send a file to someone who doesn't use AbiWord. 'Rich Text Format for old apps' is an older version of RTF, but applications have to be very old to need it. You should use normal RTF unless you know that you need to use the older version."

In other news, you can rename a .rtf document as .doc. Your prof's computer will then send it to MS-Word (because it has a .doc extension). Their copy of Word will then read it, see that it's a RTF, and open it using the RTF filter.

Native openoffice is a ways away, but it seems to not be common knowledge that abiword for OS X is coming along nicely.

So, my OS X list:

Fink
X Code
Gimp
VLC
MPlayer (for those few files VLC won't play)
Abiword
BitTorrent

That's all that comes to mind right away, I love my iApps.

This is hardly even "semi-beta stuff." It's "proof of concept." Which means it's great if you're a programmer and want to tinker, or you just want to see what Open Office for OSX will look like in a year or two, fine, but if you actually have to use Office to, I don't know, prepare documents or something, you're better off sticking with the X11 version. And if you want a real OSX interface, you're better off with MS Office. I don't like MS, but that's what I use, because it gets the job done.

If you're interested in development releases of Office products, you might also check out AbiWord which has also just been released for OSX, but again, it's not ready for prime time.

http://ryand.net/oss/abi/abiantgnomepencil.png
AbiWord Word Processor


(leave off the file name for more images of Abi the Ant)

Not yet out of alpha, but soon: AbiWord.

A very impressive project.

Personally, I crash XP much more than I crash Linux.

I'm sure it's just me.

As far as "revising a chapter on how to change your margins...": look

If you want to blather about all your theory, go right ahead -- you're missing out. The reality is here. The documentation is there, and the thankless work has been done. Not all of it, sure, but I have taken my parents (both over 50) and gotten them mostly booting Linux at home -- and they love it. It's much faster than their win2k was, and the most serious issue that I ever get bothered with has to do with finding their Windows files, and the Linux root directory (/). The user interface is not a problem at all -- in fact, sometimes they point out nice things about it.

No good examples? Have you bothered to look? Or does Linux threaten your job in such a way that you'd rather not believe it can work?

Have you tried AbiWord ? It runs on Win, UNIX and MacOS X (new!), using native GUI toolkit in each case.
http://www.abisource.com/

I was using it on Linux daily, I have not used MS Office for years. When I switched 20 months ago, I had to learn that OO.org is sucking on OS X and nobody really cares about it. It does not look native, slow, big and buggy. Suddenly it just sucked. Macs spoiled me. OS X spoiled me. And it's a good thing. I have changed from hardcore geek to somebody wo does not want to use slow unusable crap.

I wanted the ultimative usability experience and OO.org could not satisfy any of that. Since 20 months I am on search for The Office package. Haven't found one yet. I hope Apple is coming up with one soon, my another hope goes to the KDE + Qt/Mac porting project especially the koffice part of it. I gave AbiWord a shot, but it did not performe well. And there is no matching Spreadsheet app.

OO.org is dead for me. Big, slow, and too many of itch-scratch people working on it. No innovations.

What the hell are you talking about? Here is the source, and here is the license.

What the hell are you talking about? Here is the source, and here is the license.

Watch the progress of our Native AbiWord Mac OS X port (cocoa)

Want a FAST, word processor that reads and writes MS Word docs, runs on Windows, Linux and QNX?
Try AbiWord-2.0.1 just released yesterday. It loads in 1 second, looks perfect in Linux, Windows and QNX, has Tables, Footnotes, Endnotes, Mail Merge, Revisions marks and some custom features all it's own.
For a quick introduction to AbiWord-2.0 and it's many features, try the tour .
Binaries for AbiWord for Windows, QNX, SUSE 9.0 and RedHat 9 are available for download.

Want a FAST, word processor that reads and writes MS Word docs, runs on Windows, Linux and QNX?
Try AbiWord-2.0.1 just released yesterday. It loads in 1 second, looks perfect in Linux, Windows and QNX, has Tables, Footnotes, Endnotes, Mail Merge, Revisions marks and some custom features all it's own.
For a quick introduction to AbiWord-2.0 and it's many features, try the tour .
Binaries for AbiWord for Windows, QNX, SUSE 9.0 and RedHat 9 are available for download.

http://wvware.sourceforge.net/

This an open source library for Reading and writing .doc formats. It is used both by Abiword and Kword. Try it today, and in the unlikely event one of your documents dosen't import, You can report it so the library can improve.

The biggest task in breaking the Office monopoly is the file formats, so help break it.

http://wvware.sourceforge.net/

This an open source library for Reading and writing .doc formats. It is used both by Abiword and Kword. Try it today, and in the unlikely event one of your documents dosen't import, You can report it so the library can improve.

The biggest task in breaking the Office monopoly is the file formats, so help break it.

Actually, I wish that they would use Enchant, so that they could let the user decide what spellcheckers to work with. This also lets them continue using and distributing MySpell if they so desire, as Enchant's MySpell backend is top-notch.

Also, Enchant has a FreeDesktop.org endorsement, of sorts.

(disclaimer: I wrote Enchant, and thus am biased)

Here's a good list of the more common apps I have in there:

AbiWord, AstroGrep, Audacity, BitTorrent, CDex, Cygwin, Enzip, Filezilla, Gaim, Gimp, GSview, LAME, mIRC, Mozilla, Mplayer, Nero 5.5, QuickTime, TweakUI, WinAmp, winLAME

As an excellent, x-platform word processor.

I find OOo to be too bloated, and full of features I'm not going to use. Just like MS Word.

If you want on the edge engineering for the software geek, try Leary-ism.

EP geeks are TOTAL losers.

That select + delete bug is right here.

Abiword

It's been around for years...

B-List Movie lovers, and major Sean Connery buffs know of this very special movie (the only time I've ever seen Connery in drag!).

In the future, as society and civilization collapses, a small group of scientists create special remainders of civilization, called Vortexes (note: Not vorticies; linguistic abuses fill this movie nicely, especially for the scientifically minded).

Now, here's the relevant part of all of this. When a person in a vortex dies, they are "regenerated" in what appears a strange means of cloning combined with neural pathway restoration (engrammatic mapping). All this is taken care of via the "Tabernacle" (an appropriately named device, but for the time of the film, religious terms usually were).

Since I don't want to ruin the movie for you (and niether did its creator(s) based on the beginning), I won't say much more. However, I'll only say this, "Immortality sucks the unholy big one!"

-Plug

The parent is an absolute troll... but ok, I'll bite.

7) The half assed way of changing screen resolutions. The Xrandr hack is useless if you want to change colour depth.

This is an XFree86 issue, no?

5) Nautilus, half asssed file management with no "real" features. Guess whos using konqueror.

Have you bothered to actually use Nautilus? If anything, it has more features than Konqueror. It's incredibly pluggable, with hundreds of enhancement pluggins. It's now fairly efficient and usable even on my lowly 700mhz celeron.

Personally, I was quite impressed by Nautilus of late. I guess you last used one of the 1.0.x series of Nautilus.

4) Its word processor (Abi word office) has no table support

You obviously haven't used AbiWord 1.99.3 (2.0 beta3). All recent work (the last year or so) on AbiWord has gone into version 2 - which is due to be released at the end of August. AbiWord 2 has many amazing features, tables included. Other such cool features are the Open Text Summariser and Enchant. Check them both out on the AbiWord homepage.

3) The clock, in its asswipe MM/DD format (again W!=USA)

You can change that, you're trolling with that one.

2) The file dialog (no further comment)

Being fixed in Gtk 2.4. Possibly your only valid complaint.

1) HAVOC PENNINGTON

The consensus among the majority of Gnome users and developers are that the HIG is a great thing which you obviously don't understand. It's not 'remove features', it's 'be sensible about them'.

Havoc is a dedicated and decent member of the Gnome community and Gnome - and open source in general - would be much worse off without him.

Skip the openoffice page and go straight to the real action libwpd.sourceforge.net

It is being developed by Will Lachance and Marc Maurer for Abiword 2.0 (and OpenOffice too, and KOffice hopefully), I believe there are already Abiword builds with WordPerfect support already available. WordPerfect support will definately be included in Abiword 2.0

I am sure developers willing to help or testers who can break it would be appreciated.

Skip the openoffice page and go straight to the real action libwpd.sourceforge.net

It is being developed by Will Lachance and Marc Maurer for Abiword 2.0 (and OpenOffice too, and KOffice hopefully), I believe there are already Abiword builds with WordPerfect support already available. WordPerfect support will definately be included in Abiword 2.0

I am sure developers willing to help or testers who can break it would be appreciated.

Skip the openoffice page and go straight to the real action libwpd.sourceforge.net

It is being developed by Will Lachance and Marc Maurer for Abiword 2.0 (and OpenOffice too, and KOffice hopefully), I believe there are already Abiword builds with WordPerfect support already available. WordPerfect support will definately be included in Abiword 2.0

I am sure developers willing to help or testers who can break it would be appreciated.

Adobe could not be cool with a long tradition of GNU tools using mangled names of products for their GNU "clones."

Just a few:
Linux ~= Unix - Unix was a mangled name for Multix, btw.
gawk ~= awk - There are so many similarly-named command-line utilities that Stallman had a hand in that I don't dare try to list them. I think most of them even kept the names of the original Unix programs with little/no hassle.
KOffice ~= M$ Office - This is the suite that KIllustrator/Kugar belongs to. Boy, "office" is a word about as worthy of trademark as "illustrator." Wait, was that Microsoft being tolerant of trademarks!? I think so. Adobe is more viscious that M$?
KWord ~= M$ Word - more from KOffice suite.
Kivio ~= M$ Visio - KOffice suite again.
mrproject ~= M$ Project
AbiWord ~= M$ Word
KTron ~= Tron (the movie) - KDE group again. Threw this package in there to show that even the MPAA and Disney are tolerant (but not in all cases). Then again, Tron 2.0 is coming up, so maybe attention will come back.

I've noticed a lot of debate over OO's word processing application. How does AbiWord compare? I've used it a little bit and found it to be much faster and more stable than OO, though with fewer features. Its similarity to MS Word is a nice advantage over OO for the MS Word converts who don't want much of a learning curve.

I have only little experience in both OO and AbiWord though. Anyone who's used these extensively care to comment on their relative performance?

Agreed. You can also take a look at a couple of my projects - wvWare and AbiWord </shameless-plug>, KWord, or any one of a number of similar products.

[abiword on unix]
AbiWord --print=file.ps file.doc
ps2pdf file.ps

KOffice 1.3 has a similar --print command-line argument.

[abiword on win32 - follow the instructions in the parent post. it'll work for abi or any other win32 program too]

[wv anywhere]
wvPDF file.pdf file.doc

Both run well on Win32, OSX, Unix, QNX, and BeOS, which is a few more platforms than OO can currently boast. wvWare will even run on OS/390 and OS/2 with a little tweaking. Plus both can be run non-interactively from a command line or similar without a dedicated X connection, which is useful for server environments.

Most people don't know (or have forgotten) that OpenOffice isn't the only fee software office suite out there, nor is it necessarily the best one for all cases. It is a good one though, and do wish them continued success.

Dom

I am very frustrated by this process!
I followed the abiword how to install truetype fonts directions carefully, adding /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10 and /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-bitstream-vera to my /ets/X11/fs/config file. I also ran ttmkfdir -o fonts.scale mkfontdir in each of the directories. So, please, somebody, tell me why xfontsel can't find it?

Also, I recall a long time ago when I tried abiword, the default .abw file format was in xml. I think ooo is rather slow and poorly designed, despite being feature-rich (or feature-bloated). Too bad...

Lawyers, for instance, routinely re-use the headers and formatting from old documents. With [undo across save], sensitive information from a client's case can make its way into documents for other cases.

Can't a user configure Microsoft Word to "slow save" a document, deleting all undo-across-save information, whenever closing it? If so, how? If not, would all the attorneys in the audience please throw a few dollars this way?

As for NAI's intentions wrt the mark, I'm working on clarifying those now

Here's how Abisource handles it: AbiWord refers to Abisource's binary distribution, and AbiWord Personal refers to the GPL version.

I would like to remind you that Karl Ove Hufthammer has been translating AbiWord into Nynorsk for some time.... Why doesn't someone point these things out much earlier!?

because Word and Photoshop don't run on it except in the execrable WINE

"Word", short for "word processor", is a generic term referring to software more powerful than a text editor but less powerful than professional page-layout software. Therefore, word runs natively. Microsoft brand word doesn't.

Photoshop, on the other hand, is a trademark of Adobe Systems. However, the most significant thing GIMP can't do that the Photoshop brand image editor can is pre-press color image processing, which isn't useful if you will primarily be doing web or game art. As for the "easy to learn" factor, my six-year-old cousin picked up the basics of GIMP rather quickly.

Professional writers do use Abiword.

It will support tables soon, like before the end of the year.* For many people Abiword is already a usable word processor that imports and exports .docs. And it has a lot of features--check out the plugins.




*And footnotes, IIRC.

Please remove Massachusetts governor Jane Swift from Tinderbox! It's just silly, especially the comment! Who's next? GWB? Natali Portman? goatse.cx guy? I suggest disabling those pictures at all - they are too easy to abuse and nobody seems to clean them up.

Write a FAQ like every other open source project in the world

Check out the screen shot from the article: he uses Hotmail! Microsoft probably transferred the money and used it legally, since they own anything that goes through their email service.

(Okay, I admit this not a fair judgement, but still... And how does he know that the thief bought a camera?)

... since there have been enough paypal bashing for one day, how about folks kicking in a buck or two to raise some more funds for abiword?

Heck, if some nimwit in NYC can raise 20k to help pay off their credit card bill from donations, surely at least $600 can be raised to help abiword? Hell, maybe we can get some of that infamous Slashdot effect directed towards kicking a buck to their back account.

-Bill

Paypal scam screen cap.

Good for him!

Due to dietary constraints (my family has Celiac disease, so we can't eat wheat, barley, rye, oats, or any derivatives thereof), my family has to make most of our own food. Since I'm the resident geek, I dug through my spartan computer stockpile and came up with a Compaq Concerto laptop. It's 486/33MHz, and it's unique in the fact that it was intended to be a tablet-type computer. The guts are behind the 256 greyscale 640x480 screen, and the keyboard is loosely hinged and can even be removed (when you remove it, you get another PS/2 port). The screen/guts section is held up by a sort of a stand that folds out. The screen is a inductive (I think that's the right term, it's not resistive) touch screen that needs a pen I don't have, but it's got a spare PS/2 port for a handy mouse. With a floppy drive, 4 (or 8, maybe) megs of memory, 300 megabyte-ish hard drive, and 2 PCMCIA slots, it's a rather slick piece of retro computing.

For software, I've got Windows 95a (it was hard enough to install that over floppies, and I don't have a linux compatible PCMCIA network card), and AbiWord for recipes. No fancy databases here, just a folder for the recipe files, and a naming convention for the files themselves. (Food category, food name. Ex: Pizza, thin crust. or Cake, Mayonaisse chocolate).

That little computer is the most complemented and congratulated computer in my house, and we have no lack of them. After making a recipe, just click the little switch to flip it to a quick standby, fold the keyboard up, and it's nearly footprint-free, due to it's easel type stand.

I say, think about what you want it to go, and don't over-estimate it. Do you really need it to be a big whiz-bang system? Or, would a simple little older computer like this one work better? (It could go online, over a network card. Phoenix, a web browser project related to Mozilla, would probably work. (Don't quote me on that, haven't tried, though I use Phoenix for my day-to-day browsing)
br? In summary, don't overestimate your needs, and don't be afraid to look for older, but viable, solutions. Plus, if you find a Compaq Concerto, either use it, or give it to me. :-)

Shrug, keep sending your .doc format. You're missing out on the input of hundreds of very, very talented SUN and other UNIX software engineers.

If only those very talented Sun engineers had access to some product that could enable them to read MS Word. The other Unix engineers would still be out of luck, unless they too had access to some kind of product that could do the same.

Alas, I fear this will never come to pass... ;-)

An easier way to configure printers, complete M$ Office interoperability

You mean aside from CUPS and Crossover Office?

CUPS has a number of front-ends to it that are *very* easy to use, and provides an easy, GUI-oriented way to deal with printers - as its freshmeat writeup says, "it has been developed to promote a standard printing solution for all UNIX vendors and users."

Crossover Office isn't Free (and I don't run it for precisely that reason), but if the only thing tieing you or your company to Windows is the need for complete Office support, it's the most promising option out there. General word processing is better served by AbiWord, in my opinion, but this is not a sticking point of any note anymore.