Interview with Dominic Lachowicz of Abiword

Ur@eus writes: "We have just put up an interview at Linuxpower.org with Dominic Lachowicz of Abiword. I think it is an interesting read where Dom talks about what features are currently implemented, and what are underway. Abiword belongs to a very small elite of Free Software GUI applications which runs on almost all major desktop platforms without any emulation."

Comments

Lyx, Latex

[BetaJim]

If you can escape using MS for personal documents then Latex or Tex is the answer. The format is plain text. If you can't get Word to format a document you recieved your SOL. With Tex you can just cut and paste the text.

If a person is really interested in reading a document 10 years from now a Word format will not be used. I have backed up documents now that I can't read.

Does a writer really want to loose access to a document they have written? If you use a document format that isn't open you can count on loosing access.

The real answer is to use ASCII or some format that uses plain text. If you have read "In the Beginning..." by Neal Stephenson you know of these difficulties.

If your profession depends on what you write make sure that your documents are backed up as ASCII or someother easy to get at format. Backing up a .doc file is not a backup.