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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.
This is superb, but what'd be really good is a spreadsheet that they could interuse. Perhaps, AbiSpread ?
Then again, what is an ABI ?
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!
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.
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!
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
"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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
at 13MB compared to the 4MB Linux version?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
This Isn't Free Software For Windows... unless the download for the Windows source is just in an awkward spot where I can't find it. I found source downloads for FreeBSD, Linux, and MacOS X, but not Windows.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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
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.
You know, OpenOffice is actually pretty small. So is KOffice.
But AbiWord is smaller than both of them put together.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
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.
Deleted
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?