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AbiWord vs. MS Word, For Now
Gsurface writes "If you have decided that it is time to kill MS Word, then it is time to look for an alternative. Flexbeta.net compares AbiWord, part of a larger project known as AbiSource, with MS Word and asks: is AbiWord a worthy MS Word replacement? Not to ruin the ending but according to the article the only draw back to AbiWord is that it currently does not feature a grammar checker, though a plug-in is in the works." (Also on this front, AbiWord's native Mac OS X version is labeled experimental, but seems to work very nicely.)
...these things usually need to be able to work with Word formats and that's fine with AbiWord as long as you keep to text only. Start adding fancy lines and stuff in Word and view it with AbiWord, or vice versa, and things start to fall apart.
Haven't got any complaints with it as a standalone piece of software, I only tend to use about 2% of a word processor's features myself though.
Abiword is really a nice little word processor. Quite trim, nice looking GUI. Works as advertised. Much nicer than the WP part of OO.org. Also, while on the subject, gNumeric is much nicer than the spreadsheet part of OO.org.
TODO: Something witty here...
Tiny download, very fast load time, about 1/3 second for me on the first run.
Abiword is in my experience a very fine product and up to doing the things I want it to do. I doubt, that it really has all the features MS Word has, but I also doubt that most people really need these features. I for one don't and am quite happy with abiword. (Though not to start a flame war, but I prefer kword).
The only thing that is freaking driving me nuts with abiword is the way it handles language settings in linux. The language of the program and most importantly of the spell checker is determined by environment variables. Now I'm using an English system but want to use a german spell checker most of the time. I can now happily select german but I can't save this setting!!!
If any of the abiword devs is reading this. I really appreciate your product but being able to independently save my language settings would be a dream come true.
Anyway to get back on topic, abiword may not be an alternative to MS Word for everyone or in every situation, but it can certainly be an alternative for a lot of people and for a lot of situations.
Using UPX Abiword for Windows (Abiword.exe only and no other files like the spell checker) can be compressed and fit on a single floppy disk.
Try that with Microsoft Word
according to the article the only draw back to AbiWord is that it currently does not feature a grammar checker, though a plug-in is in the works.
-insert lame jokes with really poor grammar here-
But seriously folks... Is a grammar checker really that important a feature? I find that in Word, I turn it off because it drives me crazy. For one thing it is often out and out wrong. It will suggest corrections where none should exist, and falter on the more finessed rules of grammar such as singular references to indefinite pronouns or the subjunctive. Try typing "here be dragons" into Word and you'll see what I mean. If you're a pirate, Word is next to useless for noting up treasure maps, and that's just one of its many grammatical flaws for average users.
To me, these rules are the things that make English interesting and enjoyable. Products like the Word grammar checker just make people lazy and reduce the need to actually know the rules. Instead of making a computer do it we should take the time to learn the subtle details of our language. If you don't know the rules, not only will you struggle to express yourself but you will miss the details in other people's words. In this sense it's all a bit cyclic - the more our word processors fix our spelling and grammar for us, the more we devolve into a community of people with the linguistic skills of George Bush, totally dependent on pressing 'F7' to help us construct our sentences.
Or to forget the learned discussion and just quote the damn Simpsons like I was going to in the first place:
Lisa: Almost done. Just lay still.
Linguo: Lie still.
Lisa: I knew that. Just testing.
Linguo: Sentence fragment.
Lisa: 'Sentence fragment' is also a sentence fragment.
Linguo: Must conserve battery power... *switches himself off*
Read Pynchon.
what do you use for word processing and desktop publishing?
Latex and Lyx
# ssh -l neo the_matrix; killall -9 agent_smith
care to lend me a hundred bucks or so? because down here, to get what you say you have, I have to spend 3 months of my (high-standards) salary.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
There is a OO.o filter being developed and available for download - by the same project that developed the underpinings of the Abiword one.
Boring Old Fart (40, married, 3 kids...er no...make that 49, married, 3 grown up kids...it's been a long time)
The filter for Abiword also works for OOo. libwpd has a working OOo plugin and converter for WPD documents. http://libwpd.sourceforge.net/
True, but I'm a recent convert to NeoOffice/J, frequently mentioned on here, which is a wrapped-version of OOo that does support native cut and paste, along with double-clickable documents from the Finder and vastly improved font-rendering.
That last point is worth stressing - I used OOo through X11 and working with imported spreadsheets was a pain due to the vast font differences. This is vastly improved in NeoOffice. In fact the issue is gone for me, but I'm not so rash as to say gone for everyone.
Cheers,
Ian
Having Word fix corrupted Word documents
File -> Open
Click on corrupted file, click on pull down menu on the "Open" button, select "Open and Repair"
It definitely used to be. I did a little temping in legal offices way back in the day and they were all WordPerfect, which was fortunate because that's what I knew.
I don't think that's really as true anymore, though. At least, everyone I personally know in that industry has long since migrated to Word.
it is downloadable from development version's download page
OK I found it with Google... http://www.abisource.com/download/development.phtm l
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
Because they opened the wrong file by mistake and that file isn't really in the format supported by the application opening it. This goes back to a principal in GUI design where the tool should never make an irreversible change that wasn't asked for by the user without first checking with the user. In this case, the user asked to read the file, not write the file. Yet, the tool needs to write the file in order to repair it.
There is a common file format and the next release of Abiword, Kword and Open Office should all use the oasis file format:
p ?w g_abbrev=office
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.ph
Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
funny you had that problem:
using excel 2000.
Help menu -> MS Office help.
Type in 'keeping column headers visible when you scroll'.
Two hits returned on this search query, one of which tells you exactly how to do this.
Microsoft provides a great help system, if you actually take the few seconds to use it.
(Having said that - I've been using Abiword and kword a lot recently, and liking them for their lack of bloat and speed - But to claim that MS help offers no assistance is a little misleading - MS always have provided good documentation and help in their products.)
AFAIK In Windows 2000:
System Properties -> Advanced -> Start Up and Recovery -> Write Debug Information -> (none)
it does this in the space used by the swap file, so it needs to be turned off.
After that, you can turn off all swapping.
New things are always on the horizon
Link to OS X version...