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I agree with you and go one step further...if all they cared about was the space why not go with Abiword? It is small and light, thus great for Netbooks, runs on all the major OSes, again great because if one likes it they can use it at home as well as on the road, and gives you a full featured word processor without the bloat.

Who knows, maybe Google cut them a check. But it seems to me Abiword would be a better fit for a netbook than Google Docs. Can anyone tell us how Google Docs runs on ultra low powered devices like low end netbooks? Because I have run Abiword on machines as low as 400MHz and it was quite snappy and very comfortable to work in.

I am very happy that there has been another LTS release (and on my birthday)! I've been running the beta and it has been very stable other than than the firefox alpha (which seems to work fine on my debian lenny box).

I am dissapointed that abiword 2.6 didn't make the cut, though. It is a great release, however the timing of things didn't work out. You can get some context on what happened at one of the developer's blog and the bug report. Seems there was a little tension involved. Also, here are the release notes for Abiword.

Being an LTS release, I wonder if they can get it backported? I don't think that usually happens with that drastic of an upgrade - is it just security updates that get backported? However, the Abiword team will not be supporting 2.4.x for the next 3 years so I hope that something along those lines is possible.

Oh well, off to compiling it myself. :)

2.4 supports import of OpenDocument: from http://www.abiword.com/release-notes/2.4.0.phtml:

OpenDocument support

Support for the OpenDocument file format has been donated by INdT, Nokia's Technology Institute. Currently the OpenDocument import filter is basically complete, with support for styles, headers/footers, lists, image wrapping, text boxes, tables, footnotes/endnotes and tables of contents. OpenDocument export is planned as well and will be added during the 2.4.x series.

Over the years, I've used different versions of MS Office at work and tried several different office suites at home. If all you need is a word processor, even OpenOffice is overkill.

I always recommend http://www.abiword.com/. It handles MS formats fine, it loads faster, the interface feels more polished and like OpenOffice it's available for about every OS. OpenOffice has a great set of features, but it feels slow and bloated, of course that's just my opinion.

A long time ago, before the office suite concept, companies believed in "best of breed" software. You have to hand it to the marketing goons at Microsoft who convinced the corporate world that besides a word processor, every employee needs a spreadsheet and a copy of PowerPoint on their desktop.

Hate to reply to my own comment but...

Shame on me for not doublechecking that the address you supplied was correct

What have your experiences been with OpenOffice.org over the past four years?

I carefully considered its monolithism and decided to use lighter tools such as Abiword...

But I am glad that OOo exists because it's still a nice Free Trojan when it comes to infiltrating corporations with Free Software, so, Happy Birthday, OOo !!!

-FL

Why not do something similiar to Abiword?

They handle Trademarks by restricting the use of Abiword(TM) to thier own use, but allow Abiword Personal(TM) to be used on any builds built by third parties. They even make this easy on others by putting this in the sources directly.

So call it Firefox Personal or Firefox Public to designate that it is a Firefox(TM) unofficial build.

Although others have said Mozilla as a web browser, I feel that it's too bloated and slow. Try K-Meleon or Opera instead.
CDEx is a great open-source program for ripping your legally-owned CD-audio tracks. Rip them to OGG and feel your 1337ness potential expand.
Try using ZINF instead of WinAmp (bloatware ... I haven't cared for WinAmp since early 2.x) for your sound-playing abilities. The skinning abilites are also a lot better on ZINF, plus it supports more formats than WinAmp does.
If you're not looking at getting the entire OpenOffice.org suite, you can get just AbiWord, which is a great word-processing program. OpenOffice.org, however, is really full-featured and I would say almost a must.
People have already mentioned the free anti-virus software from AVG, but it doesn't hurt to have backups, such as the free online scan from Trend Micro.
As someone else also mentioned, ZoneAlarm is also a great thing to have.
Trillian and/or GAIM are great instant-messaging.

Taking a look through SourceForge and Pricelessware are great places to go and explore on your own as well.

Quickly googled up a link from eWeek:

As Apple Computer Inc. draws up its game plan for the CPUs that will power its future generations of Mac hardware, the company is holding an ace in the hole: a feature-complete version of Mac OS X running atop the x86 architecture.

There have been rumors of the move to x86 for a while. I'm not sure if I buy them -- that's a ton of QA overhead for a potential move down the line, and hopefully the G5 negates any reason for them to move. Not to mention if Apple swapped processors, all the AltiVec-optimized code would be worth creee-ap without having multiple processor *types* in each new, partially x86 powered Mac. And any way you cut it, Apple would still, I'd assume, stick some hardware dongle in there to do what Open Firmware does now: stop cheap generic hardware (or expensive hardware when you talk Pegasos) from running OS X easily. Apple is a hardware company too, you know. Solutions, not just software, etc.

But the point of the article stands, even if the author was overhyping. Anil (the author) really has two outs:

Due for launch within five years, the chip will allow future machines to run, say, Windows XP together with Linux or the Apple operating system...
1.) ... providing Apple releases/creates its rumored-but-horribly-unlikely (imo) x86 build of OS X.
2.) ... Darwin, which is an OS, just not a very popular one and not much of story. Though AbiWord does run fairly well there with X11 installed. :^)

I believe AbiWord runs on QNX.

Umm... since when does Abiword not support columns?

It looks like an interesting discussion in the text of the screenshot images. Is there some place to see the full document?

Er, it's at http://www.abiword.com/papers/pr_interview.phtml

If you install the AikSaurus plugins, located at the abiword plugins page, it will give you a nice integrated Thesaurus!

Not only would I like to thank the AbiWord team for their incredible contribution to Free Software, I'd also like to thank them for being so nice. Working with friendly people is socially motivating. I look forward to continuing contributing any way I can (which up to now has been primarily trying to confirm bugs people report on AbiWord's Bugzilla). It's a pleasure working with you, thanks for the comaraderie.

Thing is, OpenOffice being based on open sourced Star Office code base (after Sun acquired the company that created it) was aimed at "full-featured" Office Suite market. Kind of like SUVs of "productivity" applications (ie. bloated, powerful, ugly). Thus, it wasn't started out from scratch. There are more light-weight word processors (and office suites) around, such as AbiWord, but they might (still) not be as mature as, say, Star/OpenOffice. So, having all the bloat already built-in it's much more difficult to trim the fat, than building a leaner application from scratch. But on the other hand, you do have a usable finished application to work with.

One thing I'm wondering though is the compilation time. The company I used to work for had a similarly-sized (ie. couple of millions of lines of C++/C-code) application, and it compiled in 5 - 10 minutes on Visual C++ (back then on 350 mhz machines). Much of the code was straight-forward C (not C++), and even C++-code didn't make heavy use of many of C++'s slow-compilable features (templates)... And VC++ has a good compiler plus pre-compiles headers nicely. Still, more than an order of magnitude slower compilation sounds weird; it shouldn't take hours to compile that thing. Fortunately end users need not worry about that. The reason I would worry (as a developer) is that slow compilation is often caused by too many dependencies between classes that shouldn't be dependant on each other, which is usually a sign of problems at architectural level. Encapsulation and insulation should be used to reduce physical dependencies, not just logical ones (book "Large-scale C++ - projects" is a good one for reading more about the problems and solutions).

To read the latest discussion on Abiword development, check out this page.

I wonder how many people have tried MacGIMP because Adobe's taking so long to release Photoshop for OS X? Judging from some of the chat boards, I'm guessing a lot.

W
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Imagine what market/mindshare inroads can be made, if while waiting for an OS X version of Photoshop, Apple users, eager to try out some native OS X software, download and start playing with GIMP for Mac. Or maybe Abiword will get a build of OS X into their hands?

Hopefully soon it will be as common to see apps all packed up for OS X as it is to find an .RPM today...

W
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Use Abiword instead. I tried downloading OpenOffice recently and found it rather bloated and crash-prone. The only feature I needed, really, was for it to underline mispelled words--which OpenOffice didn't, but Abiword, surprisingly, did.

I installed Abiword on a Windows machine, and it's considerably faster/easier than OpenOffice. Sure, it's not for all those office "power users", but if all you're doing is writing a paper for class, it'll do what you need it to. (And optional Vi key bindings, to boot!)

Dlugar

eading your requirements, you should definitely take a look at how the Abiword people approach this.

This project is going well in that they have succesfully attracted people from the community into making serious contributions, as well as a core group of employees who spend a varying amount of time on the project. If your project could reach this stage then it would make sense for your company financially as some of the development effort would be coming from volunteers in the
community.

I think that "the community" is naturally suspicious of companies going the open source route -- are they genuine or are they just jumping on the bandwagon? -- and if you expect serious contributions you'll need to do it on the community's terms: Go with the GPL, or some other well known license.

The way that the AbiWord people approach this is that the code is GPL but they (the company) retain the trademark so that only their releases may be called AbiWord.

As for who gets to submit code: run it as a meritocracy. Initially only your employees have access, and others may only submit patches. Regular submitters of quality patches should then be considered for full CVS access.

Also, if you are looking for a word processor that does use XML -- genuine, correct, pure XML -- as it's native format, you should check out AbiWord.

It's all I use now, ever since I got sick of giant, bloated, slow StarOffice, the office suite that thinks it's an operating system. It's nice to finally see a word processor aimed at people who need want a word processor, not a spreadsheets not an email program, and not sure as hell not an "integrated desktop". Stupid StarOffice. Oh yeah, and AbiWord is GPL'd, unlike StarOffice. Kick ass.

The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land

Or you can use AbiWord which reads word files (but doesn't export them yet), or wordview (no url handy) which is the library we(abiword) use to import Word .doc.

Prove that...

>Because all our documents are in Micro$oft Word format. (The marketer in me thinks this is priceless, the NT administrator part of me thinks its fine too, but the opportunist in me sees a problem).

...MS Word files are a problem for AbiWord or Staroffice.

>So what to do about it ? We cannot afford to be seen as non-Linux-savvy by our clients. So I am forced to go and pay for several copies of VMWare simply to allow our receptionists to continue working.

...not mentioning staroffice or abiword doesn't prove you are a troll or moron (take your choice).

>Still it seems like the people that matter in the organization are finally starting to realise that Linux = $$$$$$$$$$$$$.

...linux = $$$$$.

BTW: Vmware is CHEAPER than Win 2k + MS Office (you solution, I suppose. You didn't really tell us). You proved yourself wrong, you spent MORE on the Windows/Microsoft software than Linux. Even without MS Office the price is equal.

>I just hope our marketing agency has not missed the boat.

You boss sure did by not know about staroffice or abiword.