Slashdot Mirror
AbiWord 1.0.1 Released
plam writes "After 3 years of hacking, the AbiWord team has unleashed AbiWord 1.0.1 upon the world. AbiWord is a Free cross-platform word processor which runs on Linux and Windows, MacOS X, QNX, FreeBSD, Solaris and others. AbiWord is small and compact (20 times smaller than OpenOffice!), yet contains most of the features found in larger word processors, including Word and WordPerfect import/export."
ABI is Application Binary Interface
First of all, the news is kind of old, as AbiWord 1.0.1 was put out more then a week ago. (April 29, 2002) Secondly, I would like to praise the AbiWord team. I use AbiWord for pretty much everything I need to formally write. It covers all the features most people use and I love how it loads so damn fast. (Six times faster the MS Word when I tested it.) I have some suggestions though in order of prority (if your not already working on it): - Grammar Check - Tables (sorry if I'm wrong and AbiWord does support tables) - Compile html files to a Windows standard help file Thank you for such a great piece of software!
"This will allow you to create simple tables. More sophisticated table support is the major feature planned for AbiWord 1.2. The developers already know that it is needed, and are already working on it."
troodon.net
Current Version: 1.0.1
.chm Help file.
Speed (10/10)
Website: http://www.abiword.com/
Licence: GNU General Public Licence
Operating System: Windows, Mac OS X, UNIX (including Linux), BeOS
Size: 4MB
Tested on: Windows 98
Major Propertary Competitors: Microsoft Word Screenshot: [N/A] Ease of Use Review:
Interface (9/10)
Suprise! Suprise! Anyone who ever used Microsoft Word before should have no problem using AbiWord, as the interface is modeled after it. Very easy to find formating functions and there are even the red lines under misspelled words. Help System (6/10)
While the help system is very detailed, it is not easy to navigate. Lack of a "search" feature is also a minus. It would be best if the authors of AbiWord compiled the HTML files into a single Windows
Jebus! This thing is fast! In the test, AbiWord loaded 6 times faster then Microsoft Word. It's lack of any bloat really gives it a advantage on Microsoft Word on both loading of the program, opening/saving documents, and running on lower end systems. Overall (8/10)
AbiWord is a great alternative to Microsoft Word for most uses. Most of the important features that exist in Microsoft Word exist in AbiWord, however I miss grammar check. It supports *.doc files well, and autoamticly ignores objects it doesn't know in the MS Word file.
Well, as AbiWord is part of the Gnome office suite, the accompanying spreadsheet program for that environment would probably be Gnumeric. Anything apart from Gnome, I'm afraid I don't know a whole lot about, but I know that decent free spreadsheet applications do exist.
Abi is an ant. She's blue.
As for spreadsheets, in the near future we release code which is able to embed Abiword files in Gnumeric and allows Evolution to use AbiWord to read emails.
I've been following AbiWord development for a while, and I'm still amazed by this little piece of software. I use it for all my small- and medium-sized documents (anything larger and I use LyX), and I love it.
One of the strong points of AbiWord is there's all sorts of nice "little things" features, such as the ability to import and export PalmDoc and PsionWord documents (I have both a PalmOS handheld and a Psion/EPOC/Symbian/whatever handheld). The lack of tables is a drag, but once that's added, I think this will truly be the perfect lightweight word processor. None of that useless bloat a la MS Office, just the features 99% of people need 99% of the time. Kudos to the AbiWord team.
Mozilla's a nice operating system, but it needs a better browser.
See: http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/
We've already discussed collaboration and have the beginnings of a plugin.
Actually, I use AbiWord now for all my Word translation. I get a lot of submissions that (according to our writer's guidelines) should be 'ordinary plain (ASCII) text', naturally people send Word DOC files or RTFs or PDFs (argh!)
:)
Anyway, AbiWord is the _only_ tool that's successfully opened up everything I've thrown at it. In particular, stuff from Mac Word tends to choke StarOffice and, oh, MS Word (gotta love that 'standard', as you note sometimes it can't handle its own stuff!)
And their 'automatic detection' kicks ass. I _hate_ the concept that I have to figure out which version of Word something was created in-- hello, isn't that the programs job?
My guess is the AbiWord people implemented good fallback/failsafe stuff, so that format trouble is 'guessed at and warned' rather than simple core dumped.
Given AbiWord, I've now weaned myself entirely off MS products (including Windows) for everything except my big dumb game box in the basement (ooh, Serious Sam II!)
MS should buy AbiWord and just replace their product with it
A.
No equations in the forseeable future. But, we're accepting patches. If you just send a patch to abiword-dev[AT]abisource.com, it will most likely be committed that day.
Tables and footnotes/endnotes will be in 1.2. We are overhauling the layout engine to support them.
Tables are nontrivial to implement correctly. Currently, if you really want tables, you can simulate them using tabs and over/underlining.
I started implementing endnotes[1] a while ago, but I got distracted by real life. They're not that hard, though, and once we have a new and more powerful layout engine, footnotes and endnotes should be fairly easy to implement.
[1] Footnotes go at the bottom of each page; endnotes go at the end of each section.
If it's true that AbiWord is 20 times smaller than OpenOffice and still provides comparable capabilities, those coders sure know what they are doing!
Keep in mind that OpenOffice has a lot more than AbiWord does, though...like a spreadsheet program, presentation program, etc. To say that AbiWord is 20x smaller than OpenOffice is misleading; it is, but this is because it is just a word processor and not a full-fledged office suite.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
abiword does not provide comparable capabilities. it's more of a lightweight editor. kate w/ font suppport maybe. i'd compare it more to wordpad than open office.
openoffice is definately a M$ Office alternative for general document handling, unless you've got a marketing department. those guys will create stuff that m$ office doesn't handle properly.
Abiword turns out to be a pretty good word processor. I plopped one of my roommates, who exclusivly had used Microsoft Windows up until this point, down infront of abiword a couple months ago. He was able to write a couple grad school application essays without any complaints, or without asking for any assistance. He even got his printer working without any assistance. That's quite a feat. I'm not sure you could plop a windows user down infront of a Mac and have them be able to to figure their way around so well.
Unfortunately, using abiword for my work is totally useless. While abiword has attacked the home market user, it hasn't paid much attention to the business user. By far the biggest piece of functionality abiword lacks is table support. I can't think of a single document (mostly technical I guess) I've had to write for work which did not somewhere in the document contain a table. Unfortunately abiword simply doesn't support tables, and trying to import a word document with tables, the tables just get flattened with linefeeds instead of cells. I'm not even sure how you could write a lab report using abiword without table support. Maybe you could make a table in gnumeric and paste in an image.
This is very unfortunate because everything else about abiword is quite spectacular. It is so much lighter weight then openoffice, and so much more of a pleasure to use, but, unfortunately, I'll have to continue using openoffice for a little whlie longer.
If I could program C or C++ worth a damn, I would definately do something about this! (That and allowing gnumeric to import a tab delimited file form the commandline). Alas, these Java hands of mine are useless! I feel like I should be able to help, and not just complain it. But I really can't. Maybe I can go bake the abiword people some cookies instead.
Thus, I end up using MS Word for these things, not only because my professors only deal with MS Word format, but also because of the added feature of grammar checking.
You might the Unix utilities "style" and "diction." They don't do "grammar" checking per say (i.e., they don't cite passive voice or subject-verb agreement) but this is rather simple stuff that you should catch anyways.
Diction identifies (and suggests remedies for) commonly misused phrases and lengthy sentences. Style evaluates the complexity of [sections of] your document.
I don't think that I'm describing them very well, but, as an academic, I've found them (along with wordnet and ispell) to be indispensible. And they're probably already installed on your system. Check 'em out.
The homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/diction/diction.html
Don't forget to include a spell checker with that grammar checker.
The passive voice is perfectly grammatical and useful in cases where you want to place emphasis on an act rather than who is doing it. It's mainly a usage bugaboo becasue it's all to easy to slip into using it habitually. Excessive use makes your writing sound evasive, wishy-washy, and wordy. A lot of bad government writing abuses the passive voice.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's preferred because Word flags every use of the passive voice as a grammatical error automatically. Thus some consumers of your writing will think poorly of you.
Sad but true.
You mean like at
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/abiword/setu
Table support is our most-requested-feature and our #1 priority for the next version. It's being worked on now.
It does support Word 2000 and XP but if you find a feature for those formats that is missing, file an RFE.
Yeah. It sucks. X fonts are a terrible mess. The whole sordid affair is documented in Abi bug 1030. We will use FreeType in the future, though, and I hope that this solves the problem.
/usr/share/AbiSuite/fonts. If you want to use system fonts, you need to symlink them from your system fonts directory to that directory and run mkfontdir/mkttfdir to create a fonts.dir in /usr/share/AbiSuite/fonts. Then it'll happily use your fonts.
By the way, AbiWord usually stores its fonts in
http://www.abisource.com/developers/download.ph
AbiWord is 100% pure GPL (except for LGPL libraries and other bits stolen from BSD and other strange licenses.)
Martin Sevior
A native OSX version is underway but we only have one developer doing almost all of this work along with the work he does on the other platforms.
We would really love some more Mac developers!
We know about this. Most users don't notice any problem. Some users have major problems. We acknowledge this and it's another one of our highest priorities for the next version.
The next version will use Pango and FreeType and, on *nix, probably client-side-fonts via xft.
I believe there are still some issues to get printing working properly with these newer *nix font solutions but we welcome any input.
Um, that would be trademark infringement.
But anyway, I don't think Word is a trademark, that would be ludicrous.
Check this page for more.
Just for the record, dpkg -i doesn't sort out anything, it's just complains if a dependency is missing.
From the manpage:
"(actually, checking is performed, but only warnings about conflicts are given, nothing else)"