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

is there anything like this coming out??

[josh crawley]

This is superb, but what'd be really good is a spreadsheet that they could interuse. Perhaps, AbiSpread ?

Then again, what is an ABI ?

Grammar Checking...

[Thomas M Hughes]

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.

Look, I don't want to spoil the party

[Colin Smith]

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.