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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 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
Abi is an ant. She's blue.
As for spreadsheets, in the near future we release code which is able to embed Abiword files in Gnumeric and allows Evolution to use AbiWord to read emails.
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 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 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.
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.
You might the Unix utilities "style" and "diction." They don't do "grammar" checking per say (i.e., they don't cite passive voice or subject-verb agreement) but this is rather simple stuff that you should catch anyways.
Diction identifies (and suggests remedies for) commonly misused phrases and lengthy sentences. Style evaluates the complexity of [sections of] your document.
I don't think that I'm describing them very well, but, as an academic, I've found them (along with wordnet and ispell) to be indispensible. And they're probably already installed on your system. Check 'em out.
The homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/diction/diction.html
You might the Unix utilities "style" and "diction."
You might the Unix utilities yourself, Yoda.
Strong in this one the force is.
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.