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."

Comments

Release announcement

[plam]

I didn't include it in the story, but here's our AbiWord 1.0.1 release announcement.

The AbiWord team is proud to announce the release of AbiWord version 1.0.1, a free-software Word Processing program. More than three years in the making, AbiWord is a reliable, cross-platform word processor with many powerful features.

AbiWord aims at robust inter-operability with existing products, including Microsoft Word(R), Corel WordPerfect(R), and others. AbiWord's goal is to incorporate the most useful features of these competing applications without the fluff, bloat, or slowness that generally accompany them.

Translations and spell checking are available for more 30 different languages. An English Language Thesaurus for use within AbiWord can also be freely downloaded.

We have not yet implemented tables or footnotes. Tables and footnotes are the first priority for our next development phase. We have already made impressive progress toward this and other new features.

AbiWord is available for Linux and other Unix variants, Windows, Mac OSX and QNX.
You can learn more about AbiWord from our website at http://www.abiword.com/.
AbiWord can be downloaded from http://www.abiword.com/download/.

AbiWord was initially developed by SourceGear Inc.; today, AbiWord development has been continued by a worldwide team of volunteer developers. AbiWord is free software available under the GNU General Public License.

The AbiWord team can be contacted via email at: abi@abisource.com.

Re:tables????

[Troodon]

According to this manual section it appears to offer very basic table support.

"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."

Re:is there anything like this coming out??

[plam]

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.

Re:Tables, Equations, Footnotes

[plam]

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.

Lets hear it for table support!

[Leghk]

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.

Re:Grammar Checking...

[rubinson]

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