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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."
Even though people can argue about what software is better to work with, I can see a benefit in having multiple programs that do the same thing. In the case of using AbiWord vs. OpenOffice as a word processor, AbiWord would be great to use as your default viewer for word processor files in your web browser since it is quite a bit smaller and will launch very quickly. On the other hand, if you end up needing to do some hardcore editing and prefer OpenOffice, you can take the extra couple of seconds to launch OpenOffice if it is necessary. There is value in having a choice!
Hasn't filed suit against them yet for "Copyright Infringement." I mean... they've got "Word" in their name! Doesn't anyone remember the "Lindows" debacle?
...not saying that either side is right, but there's always room for some more Microsoft bashing in this world.
So, have you made these doc files available to developers of AbiWord, OpenOffice, KOffice, etc? It's hard to fix what you can't reproduce.
Come to think of it, I've got a few files like that too -- old files from MS Word for Macintosh circa 5.0 (ie about 10 years old). MS Word (Windows versions) can sometimes be coaxed and coerced into reading them, but only with the proper filters installed (which aren't by default).
I guess by your rules even Word shouldn't claim it can import Word.
-- Alastair
If the WordPerfect filters are decent, this is--for me, at least--huge. WordPerfect still has a strong presence in certain industries. Law is frequently mentioned but many academics are still using WordPerfect as well. Indeed, I keep a copy of WordPerfect 8 for Linux (the native version, not that crappy Wine port) on my machine for occassional file from my colleagues (as well as for a handful of my own files from my days of using WP).
I no longer have any need for Word thanks to OpenOffice; perhaps AbiWord will permit me to eliminate the last of my proprietary applications from my desktop.
Write letters and papers and documentation in a word processor, and code in an editor or development suite.
Again, sorry--but that was just a complete waste of a complaint. If I had mod points at the moment, I would mod you -1, silly.
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
I've never actually seen the grammar checker in Microsoft Office do anything useful. I think it's a bit fiddly to have a computer attempt to do such a thing in the first place (like a spell checker, it certainly won't catch all of the errors). I've often disagreed with it.
The best method by far (IMHO) is to have someone else proofread your writing. If he is also a writer, you can trade. When proofreading your own work, errors will often slip by, because your brain knows what _should_ be on the page.
It's also very helpful to read a lot of edited material (books, newspapers, etc.). _The_Elements_of_Style_ is a nice guide.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
It's good that you're able to make a list of reasons to have tables and all, but I have to say that most of the time that people use tables in a word processor document, they would have been better using a spreadsheet.
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.
Digital Citizen
Even Word sometimes chokes and dies on them.
Have you considered the very real possibility that the problem isn't the import filters, but some corrupted doc files? Especially earlier versions of Word did not much care for "open > edit > save > open > edit > save > rinse > repeat". Repetitive edits of the same document tend to start mucking things up.
You might try copy and pasting your files clean. If offending document can open, copy everything outta there and paste into a new doc.
I know it sounds like a cheap hack, but I have seen this work. With that fresh, and free of extra cruft, document you might want to try some of those import filters again. They may still not work fully, but at least they've been given a fair test.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
The problem is that the X font system is pretty much useless for anything that involves sophisticated layout work. It has to be addressed at the root, either by the X consortium, or by someone creating an application-independent font system that makes fonts of all flavors available to X applications, bypassing X's font mechanism, to the printing filters, to whatever part of the system has to access fonts in some way. Keith Packard (great guy, really helps getting X out of the past with RENDER and the like) has designed a mechanism called fontconfig (I hope everybody at the GUADEC has listened to him), but I don't know exactly how powerful that is.
However, the current situation is a horrible mess and in my opinion also the biggest Linux usability hurdle of them all.
I've always written my documents in plain ascii first and then opened up a copy in a word processor for formatting, or marked up a copy with HTML or LaTeX, depending on my needs... but I've always kept those original plain text copies. This has saved my ass a few times, especially when I used to use Word 97 on Windows 98 and it would impose its 'write corrupted nonsense to disk in case of system oops' feature on me.
The only inconvenient part is merging revisions back to the original.
Whoever claimed that AbiWord is 20x smaller than OpenOffice is lacking basic arithmetic skills.
OpenOffice source: 128MB
AbiWord source: 15MB
15MB x 20 = 300MB.
300MB != 128 MB
300MB >> 128 MB
They are also comparing a word processor to a complete office suite, but that is another matter.
Three years later, I'm still mystified by the attention Abiword gets. It even gets press coverage.
It's not even a word processor by late-1980s standards. No table support! No floating footnotes! The column support doesn't seem to allow changing the number of columns midstream--it's all or nothing.
No merge functionality! (Oh, but there are two optional, unbundled scripting plugins you can theoretically write your own merge function with--except that there's no user-defined field support, either, so any merge fields in a document would be ad-hoc, unprotected, and would show up as spelling errors.)
Great, so it's "lightweight" and starts up quickly, and it's cross-platform. Yipee. But I remember in 1988 it was pretty fair to expect a graphical word processor--even on the Amiga and the C64--to support tables and footnotes, mail merging and real, multiple-layouts-per-page column support.
Don't get me wrong. It's nice of the Abiword team to put their time into writing software they obviously find and useful, and it is nice to see a solid, genuinely useful embeddable GTK+ richtext widget come out of this, but can we please stop mentioning it in the same breath as word processors?