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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."
Actually three years to write a fully-flegded cross platform word processor is pretty good. I remember back in the .7 days it was still pretty kickass. I haven't tried it in a while, but it would certainly be nice to have some alternatives, especially ones that load as fast as AbiWord.
Well.. One less reason I have to boot to Windows
I'm a high school student and I'm an advocate of open source software. I've installed AbiWord on several machines at school (which run Windows), and most of the people at school are happy with it. It opens most Word documents (at least ones they've come across), and the best part of it, is they don't even have to pay a single dime for Office to do word processing. :-)
This is superb, but what'd be really good is a spreadsheet that they could interuse. Perhaps, AbiSpread ?
Then again, what is an ABI ?
Unfortunately, I'm a University Student (one of those eternal students actually). That means I end up doing a lot of word processing, paper writing, and the like. And its not always in English either. At the same time, having a grammar checker on hand does make proof-reading my own papers much easier, for simple stuff like subject-verb agreement, and the use of active voice instead of passive voice. In my brief experiments with both OpenOffice and AbiWord, both lacked a grammar checker to do this.
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. However, MS Word isn't exactly perfect in this respect. I do large amounts of my writing in the University computer labs, on their mass installs of MS Word, which only deal in English. Microsoft charges extra for increased language support in Word (last I checked it was a fairly sizable amount of money too). But I digress...
Unfortunately, its hard to break the MS Word strangle hold not only because of the file format being so nasty to deal with, but also the fact that MS has developed a very good and useful feature in its grammar checker.
I have on my hard drive at home a half-dozen documents that fall into the category of "standard Word documents", which is to say, they're the kind of documents you'd see on the "average" corporate network.
Even Word sometimes chokes and dies on them.
My point is, when I see "import Word documents", I can't help but think, "But what kind of Word documents?". I got burned too many times trying to convince my officemates to go away from MS and Office. Those documents are now a shrine for me: parse and display these, and you've won. Otherwise, don't even try to claim you can import Word.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Abiword has suited the needs of my highschool attending brother however for power users its lacking.
I personally couldn't consider using it without foot notes / cross references. I realise that people such as myself probably aren't their target market, but surely it's a mistake to throw away a huge potential market.
University Students, are currently being offered dicounts on MSOffice (only costs you an arm now), these are the people who'll be using computers for the next 30 years, but they won't be using abiword until it supports footnotes!
I have a Pent133 IBM 760E laptop (32meg RAM/1GB HDD) and to put MSOffice on here is horrible, believe me i tried.
Clocking in at 4.3 megs for the windows version, AbiWord is TINY! Upon installing it the license agreement came up:
"The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users"
I know most open source users find this run-of-the-mill, but i'm a stright up windows guy. Not only was reading the license enjoyable but it was very easy to read. (note to myself: why am I not running GNU software more often??*** see below)
Abiword is FAST FAST FAST. I've used Sun's OpenOffice a couple of times but I didn't really care for it all that much. Abiword's layout is clean and neat as well. I find it painfully distracting to see a billon icons on the top toolbar on some word processing apps. This is a plus for me at least.
I also like how AbiWord handles multiple instances of documents. A totally seperate window for each document. I use notepad for word processing (don't laugh!) so i'm used to this. From time to time i also use Word 2000 and I don't really care for the window behind a window layout of it at all.
Needless to say for 4.3 megs is a very efficient program that's fast, easy to use, and free.
---
*** - (any one know of a easy to use linux distro for an IBM pent 133 Thinkpad 760E 32meg ram/1gb hdd and a 3com etherlink III card?
i'd like to migrate and use X, my friend has it on his boxen and I like using it and I'd like to give it a spin, hardware specs allowing. I used caldara and corel but eh. It wasn't pretty, and i really don't know what i'm doing when it comes to getting under the hood. Any ideas, suggestions, anything are/is appreaciated!)
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
at 13MB compared to the 4MB Linux version?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
AbiWord has headers and footers, but no footnotes. I think that if you hit Ctrl-[ and Ctrl-] you get respectively the headers and footers, or you can use the edit menu.
This is a known bug.
MS Word does do a better job if i18n than us right now but, after tables and footnotes/endnotes, improving i18n is our next highest priority. We have a special metabug right now to track tricky multilinal problems.
Work is already underway to add Pango and FreeType support.
Even without them our Chinese support is very good, our Hebrew support is also very good (make sure you get the bidi-build), and our Arabic support should be good but I'm not sure how much testing it has received.
So try it out with all the languages you want and file some bug reports!
But I'm not going to be using word processors in the future, ever again.
I have several hundred megabytes and several thousand files of documents written on WordStar, WordPerfect, Word 2, Word 6, Lotus (Wordpro?), Applix word and Brown Bag MindReader[1].
The documents are essentially useless to me now, the time investment I made in writing them has not paid off. I'll have to invest significantly more time and effort to make these documents usable.
Instead, I'm going to use bog standard vanilla HTML for all documents and letters in the future. That way, the time I invest in writing, articles, documentation and letters will not be wasted. I can use any HTML editor or text editor I wish and the documents will be viewable and printable from any web browser on any platform.
It would be nice if there were open standards like HTML for spreadsheets and vector graphics. I'm tired of word processors and office suites.
[1] BTW, this was a lovely DOS based word processor which guessed which word you were typing. Fantastic for technical documents using long technical terms.
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Yep, someone give me a call when it actually RUNS on OS-X. If I want to install an X-server I can run it remotely from my Linux box as it is.
Its just a word processor, so sure its smaller then a simi-complete 'suite'(OO)...
Not judging if its bad or good.. just dont mislead
people by compairing apples to oranges..
---- Booth was a patriot ----