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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."
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.
"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
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.
The actual coding only takes a couple of weeks. The rest of the time is consumed by product planners trying to think of any new features compelling enough to justify the price of an upgrade.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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?