AbiWord vs. MS Word, For Now

Sadly... by cs02rm0 · 2004-09-01 01:54 · Score: 5, Informative

...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.

Re:Sadly... by Lord_Raptor · 2004-09-01 02:36 · Score: 4, Informative

Shouldn't this become easier in the Future with new Versions of Office (2003+) Looks like MS is going forward with XML, which should make plugins and filters much easier. Simple filters should be as easy as a XML transform. They also seem to be offering Royalty free licenses and documentation to the reference Schemas. info: http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/default.mspx
Re:Sadly... by VirtualAdept · 2004-09-01 04:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

Unfortunately, this won't help in the short term. Its going to be a very, very long time (if ever) before the only office users are office 2k3 users. There are still, after all, people out there using Office 97.
Re:Sadly... by Zardoz44 · 2004-09-01 04:19 · Score: 2, Interesting

Am I the only one that notices the whole line of text flicker in Abiword when typing. This drives me nuts. It's a small, slick-looking tool, but this is one of those make-it or break-it features.
To clarify this, I tried on several machines of different speeds, all with the same results. Just open a new document and type gibberish on a single line and let it wrap. When you get near the end of a line, all the text starts to have a refresh issue. It's not a machine limitation because it's the same between 200mhz and 1.8Ghz. It's not a spellcheck problem because it happens when spellcheck is turned off.
I did a quick check on the Abiword bugzilla, but the only mention I could find was claimed to have been fixed. The latest stable download still has it, so I'm not sure which version they meant.
Re:Sadly... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-01 04:23 · Score: 2, Informative

If I remember correctly, that bug fix made it into 2.1.6, which is available for download from the AbiSource front page. However, there are still numerous instances of flickering.
Re:Sadly... by Haeleth · 2004-09-01 04:29 · Score: 4, Insightful

Simple filters should be as easy as a XML transform.

This is a popular fallacy. But XML only says how the data is stored - it says absolutely nothing about what data is stored.

Consider how you might store a table layout in XML. There are literally thousands of ways you might go about it. The chances of you and someone else even choosing to store the same bits of information, let alone with a similar structure, are, frankly, pretty slim. So, no, it's not "easy as an XML transform". The only advantage of XML is that it makes it easier to read the data -- but the tricky part is interpreting it, and XML does nothing to help there.
Re:Sadly... by wickersty · 2004-09-01 10:07 · Score: 2, Insightful

Not for nothing, but you are contradicting yourself. "Simple filters should be as easy as a XML transform." You said: The only advantage of XML is that it makes it easier to read the data -- but the tricky part is interpreting it, and XML does nothing to help there. Umm... yeah... if MS stores Word data using XML... and AbiWord knows the way XML is used to store the data, then it IS as simple as an XML transform. And not for nothing, but an XSLT pretty much IS an interpretation of XML... the code written in an XSLT is written to take in XML and apply a transformation to it based on how the source XML is organized. It's the whole point to an XML Transformation. It's like saying making orange juice is not as simple as squeezing an orange, because you have to squeeze an orange to do it.
Re:Sadly... by jwhitener · 2004-09-01 10:21 · Score: 2, Interesting

Out of curiosity about this "new Word killer", I opened a 100 page OfficeXP .doc file, complete with pictures and tables into my newly installed AbiWord.

First time crashed. Second time, crawled to a halt, took 5-10 seconds to scroll down one page.

Sorry, but unless a word editor can flawless handle huge crappy .doc files, it ain't replacing Word.
Re:Sadly... by Erik+Hollensbe · 2004-09-01 16:40 · Score: 2, Informative

For starters, it's easy to preach and hard to prove.

XSLT can do great transformations but it is no match for a program that actually knows how to interpret the content - a badly designed XSD will not transform well.

Here's an example of a horrible but all too common schema problem:

<price1>12.95</price1>
<price2>13.95</price2>
<price3>14.95</price3>

XSLT simply cannot predict that there are going to be 10 of those prices, nor can it predict that there is an upper bound of 50 of them.

And if you haven't seen that, I'm sure you've seen the same principle applied to tag attributes, which supplies the same problem.

To make a "simple" thing more complicated, you get into fun things like character sets and fonts (combined this can be a very nasty mess - "webdings" is a great example of how your character set means nothing), and then to insure the complete compatibility of the document the rendering engine will most likely need to be swapped or reconfigured depending on the format you're reading or signature "quirks" of the "common" format - we already see this in HTML - Opera and Firefox both have multiple rendering engines to better support IE-only pages.

For a great example, take a look at the w3c specs - they are very simple and fairly well-defined nowadays, and still, no browser renders everything properly. How do you expect a clone of a proprietary program with a closed format to fare any better?

Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by garcia · 2004-09-01 01:54 · Score: 5, Interesting

According to the article AbiWord is better because of the larger icons as they are easier to distinguish. The smaller memory footprint which is ~6MB instead of what they claim is ~30MB for Word but which I claim is only ~17MB according to my tasklist).

Once we move into the "Features" section I lose all interest in the comparison... It's apparent that the reviewer doesn't really have a clue how to use Word, take for example: Another great feature in AbiWord is the insert field option. The reviewer fails to mention that Word has many of the same features located under Insert->Date/Time. As far as an updated word counter... That shows in my toolbar (so far I have 120 words). If he was doing this to show what AbiWord can do that Word can do too I don't exactly think he chose the most important item to compare. Personally I would be more interested in a comparison of the quality of documents loaded from other versions. If AbiWord can load a Word97 and Word2000 document better than OfficeXP can then I would be impressed. That's just me though (I have a feeling this would be an important thing to look at for others as well).

The size of AbiWord is a big boost though. The author claims it's around 5MB. If that's true that's pretty good for what you get. I had tried to use AbiWord back in the day while futzing around trying to work on Linux in a Windows world but it failed to meet my needs. For those with small amounts of RAM or a complete need to be MSFT free this seems like a good alternative.

Overall the "review" was weak. I didn't see any points that would make me want to rush out and install AbiWord over any other word processing offering. He basically pointed out some quick things he stumbled upon and didn't do any real digging. Honestly, it's not worth the time spent clicking through the multiple pages.

Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by Planesdragon · 2004-09-01 02:00 · Score: 2, Interesting

EVERY feature he noted for AbiWord is one that Word already has. Even that "shrink text when change window size" is in there.

This is why Word is still the dominate WP. It's got at least a little bit of everything you need; if you're willing to live with some odd quirks, you can even use it to replace almost all of the rest of Office.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by Mongoose+Disciple · 2004-09-01 02:09 · Score: 4, Interesting

If AbiWord can load a Word97 and Word2000 document better than OfficeXP can then I would be impressed. That's just me though (I have a feeling this would be an important thing to look at for others as well).

Yup. Like it or not, the reality is that Word is the standard in the realm of word processors. Now, you can grab the odd caveman who's never seen Word and teach them to use your word processor, but to really gain users, you're going to have to steal some market share from Word. You don't necessarily need to emulate all of Word's features and quirks to get those users, but they're probably going to want to be able to use their old documents.

We really don't know from the review how AbiWord handles this at all. It might do a great job or a terrible job; we just don't know. Honestly, I'd rather see a review from someone who is an experienced user of Word, even if they're less technical.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by BenjyD · 2004-09-01 02:17 · Score: 5, Insightful

It's also $200 or so (unless you get it with a new computer).

I'd call randomly corupting files and moving images around more than annoying quirks. The fact is, Word's only killer feature is 100% Word compatibility. Combine that with a monopoly, saturation advertising and restrictive licensing deals with OEMs and you have a WP that's hard to beat.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by AKAImBatman · 2004-09-01 02:21 · Score: 2, Interesting

Task manager only displays the memory that hasn't been swapped out. You could have a program using gigs of memory, and taskmn may only show you a few megs. Actual memory usage is a bit more difficult to track under Windows, and requires the use of special tools.

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Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by toopc · 2004-09-01 02:26 · Score: 5, Interesting

You've hit upon a huge problem Word has, and acutally has had for quite some time --making the features disoverable.
As a previous poster said many people only use 2% of the features of a program like Microsoft Word. Which is to say they use it just ever so slightly different than they would use a typewriter. Just about nobody reads the help files on software, so although Word can probably do a half dozen different things they'd find useful, they may never discover those features. I can't count the number of times on some messageboard where someone has said, "I wish Word could do this," only to have me reply, "It can" and show them how.
So that leads to the obvious problems like you've found in this review. I use something like Open Office Writer or AbiWord and I immediately notice all the things they can't do that Word can. While someone who only uses 2% of the features of Word thinks it's a direct feature match up.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by soybean · 2004-09-01 02:52 · Score: 5, Insightful

I'm sorry, but word just does NOT have 100% word compatibility. Give me ANY two versions of word, and I can generage a doc on one version that doesn't load properly on the other version.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by hey! · 2004-09-01 02:57 · Score: 3, Interesting

Make that 99.5% Word compatibility. Word sometimes screws up the rendering of complex documents after they have been saved and reopened. Of course, you shouldn't be using it as a page layout tool.

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Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by Dan+Ost · 2004-09-01 03:00 · Score: 3, Interesting

Like it or not, the reality is that Word is the standard in the realm of word processors.

Not if you work in a legal office. WordPerfect is the standard there.

Just thought you might like to know.

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*sigh* back to work...
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by hey! · 2004-09-01 03:02 · Score: 2, Interesting

This, by the way, is the origin of Clippy. The majority of feature requests Microsoft receives for Office are for features that are already in there.

Simply put, Word's too big.

A compound document architecture (like KParts) and a plug-in architecture (like JEdit) might provide some ways around this problem. I'm a bit conflicted about plug-ins modifying the user interface, because of support issues. However, if you are going to provide so many functions, most of which people never use, simplification is a net win.

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Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-01 03:06 · Score: 2, Insightful

Maybe this argument would carry more weight if Word was better debugged!

Part of the reason I only use 2% of Word's features is because every time I step out of the normal everyday stuff to use one of those sexy features, I find:
1. It is very poorly implemented (I mean, c'mon, headers and footers are still an abortion in Word 2000!)
2. It is buggy; many of the advanced features in Word work poorly or not at all! Hell, they can't even make the auto-number stuff work consistently. If you restart numbering in each section of a document, how do you tell Word exactly which pages you want to print? Most of these things were haphazardly pasted onto Word without any thought or design.
3. I have had to maintain compatibility with various versions of Word. Those advanced features are exactly what breaks most horribly trying to move from one version of Word to the next. Yeah, that's exactly what I want to use in a manual I have to maintain for the next 5 years through several versions of Word.

So, in short, the reason I only use 2% of Word is because Word forces me too!
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by boinger · 2004-09-01 03:21 · Score: 2, Funny

Yeah, MS Word does do that a lot better.

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Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by Jim+Hall · 2004-09-01 03:58 · Score: 2, Insightful

We really don't know from the review how AbiWord handles this at all. It might do a great job or a terrible job; we just don't know. Honestly, I'd rather see a review from someone who is an experienced user of Word, even if they're less technical.
Interesting that you should ask for that. I've been thinking about writing (another) "review" of StarOffice/OpenOffice compared to MS Office. I'm a manager at a large university, and I moved to a Linux desktop about 2 yrs ago. I get lots of Word/Excel/PPT docs from co-workers and other employees, and I'm able to work transparently with those documents.
While there have been many StarOffice (or OpenOffice) "reviews", I don't think any have talked about how transparently you can work with documents, how easily you can import and export docs, and how the imported Word doc may differ under StarOffice/OpenOffice.
Hint: The only issues I've had with imported documents have been with word- and paragraph-wrapping (widow/orphan). If I print out my (imported) copy and bring it to a meeting, a paragraph might start at the top of page 12 for me, but at the bottom of page 11 for someone else who printed it from MS Word.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by Lumpy · 2004-09-01 04:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

Word's only killer feature is 100% Word compatibility.

which it DOES NOT HAVE.

Word 2003 is not 100% compatable with Word 97. word 2000 had trouble with word95 AND word97 files.

there are HUGE compatability problems between versions of Word that make the switch to Open Office look like tiny annoyances.

Microsoft intentionally does not want 100% compatability with previous version of the .DOC file format... It would allow that small office with 3 employees to continue to happily use their Office 95 CD's they got back in 1995 and work perfectly fine for them.

Microsoft does not like nor want that.

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Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by BenjyD · 2004-09-01 04:48 · Score: 2, Interesting

Nooo... you've bought back my memories of the summer internship I spent writing VBA code in Office 97. I'd been trying to block that out.

After two months flat-out coding, in the last week, most of the company upgraded to Office 2000 . My program just refused to run at all on 2000. I spent the last week trying to make it work, but nothing I did made any difference. I had to scrabble around for an older machine with 97 on it just to do a demonstration to proce I'd done any work at all.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by Lennie · 2004-09-01 06:40 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

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New things are always on the horizon
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by antiMStroll · 2004-09-01 08:19 · Score: 2, Insightful

My problem with Word is preventing it doing things it thinks I should do instead of doing what I tell it too do. I'd pay money for a SFTU MS-Word HowTo.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by mobets · 2004-09-01 09:29 · Score: 2, Interesting

As a student, one of the things I use word for is taking notes. Word has an outline view that lets you use tab to demote things and shift+tab to promote things. It creates the next line at the same level as the previous and the word wrap wraps around to the proper indintion. It also allows you to collapse entire sections to a single line. All very usefull for quick note taking.

AbiWord dowsn't seem to have this, and ouline view in Open Office didn't dow it either

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It's nice. by Tyler+Eaves · 2004-09-01 01:54 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

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Re:It's nice. by dTaylorSingletary · 2004-09-01 02:14 · Score: 2, Interesting

Ah but Gnumeric is missing a very key feature that is required in the business I'm in. It doesn't automatically interpret HTML tables as a spreadsheet. With both OOCalc and Excel, if you have an HTML table labeled as an .xls file, either program will automatically open it as if it were an excel file. Incredibly useful feature for custom web programming with report generation.

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d. Taylor Singletary,
reality technician techra.el

Getting Rid of Word Perfect by wackysootroom · 2004-09-01 01:57 · Score: 3, Interesting

One thing that Abiword has that Open Office doesn't is a Word Perfect Filter.

Our organization *really* wants to kill WP, but can't replace it with open office because there is no WP filter. Does the WP filter that comes with ABIWord work well?

Re:Getting Rid of Word Perfect by Pandora's+Vox · 2004-09-01 02:01 · Score: 2, Interesting

StarOffice does have a WP filter. It's quite good. And SO is still much cheaper than M$ Office

-Leigh
Re:Getting Rid of Word Perfect by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-01 02:09 · Score: 2, Funny

WORDPERFECT FILTER:

alias ls='ls | grep -v *.wkb'

Would you like fries with that sir?
Re:Getting Rid of Word Perfect by phiala · 2004-09-01 02:15 · Score: 3, Interesting

My organization has standardized on DOC as the format of choice, which usually poses no problem for OOo. However... some administrators seem to be incapable of remembering this, and send out really important files in WordPerfect format.

My solution has been to use wpd2sxw to convert them, which seems to work fine for most stuff (at the very least, I can figure out what the memo is about). Since most of the windows users here (everyone but me) complain about not being able to read the WPD files, I think I might actually be ahead of the game!

The converter is available online, and does wpd2 other things as well.

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I prefer to be called Evil Scientist.
Re:Getting Rid of Word Perfect by Bill_Mische · 2004-09-01 02:27 · Score: 2, Informative

There is a OO.o filter being developed and available for download - by the same project that developed the underpinings of the Abiword one.

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Re:Getting Rid of Word Perfect by sthingp · 2004-09-01 02:27 · Score: 3, Informative

The filter for Abiword also works for OOo. libwpd has a working OOo plugin and converter for WPD documents. http://libwpd.sourceforge.net/

No grammar checker doesn't sound bad by danormsby · 2004-09-01 01:58 · Score: 2, Interesting

The download is 5MB. 5MB!!! This is what I want in a document editor.

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Re:No grammar checker doesn't sound bad by Chess_the_cat · 2004-09-01 02:14 · Score: 2, Insightful

5MB!!! This is what I want in a document editor.
Unless you're running a 486SX with a 200MB HD that's got to be the stupidest requirement for a document editor I've ever heard of. Fuck the size! Fuck the memory footprint! Who cares? This is 2004. I've got half a terabyte of storage. I've got 2 gigs of memory. I can download a 100 meg file in under 5 minutes. You're not going to sell me on a document editor because it's small. lol.

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AbiWord advantage by dtfinch · 2004-09-01 01:58 · Score: 3, Informative

Tiny download, very fast load time, about 1/3 second for me on the first run.

Question to slashdot readers by Karamchand · 2004-09-01 01:59 · Score: 2, Interesting

While I was really successful converting my family away from MSIE to Firefox I wonder whether the migration from MS Word to AbiWord would be as problem-free either. For example my sisters used MS Word to write and format their disserations (whether this in itself is good or bad doesn't matter here; no, they won't use LaTeX). Would AbiWord be able to do all this stuff as well? Various headings, automatics index and TOC generation, various styles? I'd be very glad if you could help me with the decision whether I should start this conversion too! Thanks!

Are grammer checkers that important? by weeboo0104 · 2004-09-01 01:59 · Score: 4, Funny

I don't have a problem with abiword not having a grammer checker, It's unpossible to add-in every function that everybody would want right off the bat there. It's not like I ever used those grammer check things anyways.

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Fair Comparison? by pedestrian+crossing · 2004-09-01 02:00 · Score: 3, Insightful

How about comparing AbiWord to MS Works, that's what most folks at least used to get on their OEM installation...

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A house divided against itself cannot stand.

What about outlines? by bman08 · 2004-09-01 02:01 · Score: 4, Funny

Just last week I put Word, Abiword and Ooffice head to head on outlining a project. All I want is simple, collapsible outlines that I can easily modify and are labeled I., A., 1., a., etc...

The result... nobody wins. Word comes closest, but I still spent so much time wrestling with the software that I just grabbed a piece of paper and got my work done in record time. (course it was way harder to email)

One big gripe I have... by Noryungi · 2004-09-01 02:02 · Score: 2, Interesting

... is that Abiword is slow on my machine, which is reasonably powered (Pentium III 800MHz, 384MB of RAM).

I spend most of my days writing for a living, and I need something that is fast . One of the reasons WordPerfect 5.1 is still one of my favourite program of all time is its sheer speed.

Up until then, I used Ted, which is a very nice little program, but I am more and more annoyed by its shortcomings (no 'undo'? I mean, come on!).

Anyway... I recently upgraded my machine to Slackware 10, and I'll give Abiword another try.

Which is actually a good 'Ask Slashdot' question: what do you use for word processing and desktop publishing? Again, I need something fast and stable, with a reasonable feature set. Cute GUI and eye candy and even anti-aliased fonts are optional.

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Re:One big gripe I have... by klaasvakie · 2004-09-01 02:15 · Score: 3, Informative

what do you use for word processing and desktop publishing?

Latex and Lyx

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Good starting point by Un0r1g1nal · 2004-09-01 02:03 · Score: 4, Interesting

If Abiword is to take over M$ word, it is going to still need a lot of work, however it's good to see something that looks like it will continue to progress into something greater. It doesn't yet have that much functionality, but this is something that can be built upon as they develop.

To be able to use it cross platform is probably the best function, users tend to not like change. Get them used to a certain desktop/layout and if anything changes they don't know what to do with themselves, they need training in the new applications and functionality of them. If the basic word processing and other similar basic and necessary apps are able to stay constant, so to speak, it may give more encouragment to admins to start the bold plunge of rolling out more linux based systems.

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Lack of grammar checker a problem? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-01 02:04 · Score: 3, Interesting

All grammar checkers do is irritate the literate by flagging false positives, while instilling a false sense of confidence in the illiterate, who proceed to perpetrate horrors on the defenceless English language -- and, should the error of their ways be pointed out, they then claim that they must be right, because the grammar checker said they were!

Grammar checkers should be banned until one can demonstrate the ability to parse English correctly in the general case. Hint: this has not yet been achieved even in high-tech research programs running on supercomputers, let alone in consumer products.

No grammar checker... who gives a F? by crazyhorse44 · 2004-09-01 02:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

The first thing I do after killing Clippy is disabling the grammar checker. The thing is such a piece of garbage... the last thing I need is for a computer to tell me how to write.

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Well, my experience by AbbyNormal · 2004-09-01 02:05 · Score: 3, Interesting

I just got rid of the latest version of AbiWord for Open Office. I was trying to save a new file into a Word document format for a customer, and for whatever reason, the file would NOT be read by MS OFFICE (2000 or XP) no matter what the version I saved it as. I switched to Open Office and had no problems after. I'm not touting one or the other, just letting people know of my experiences (and most likely other's who are also experimenting switching their Office suite out).

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Un-informed reviewer by vasqzr · 2004-09-01 02:07 · Score: 3, Insightful

Another feature I found unique to AbiWord is when you restore the AbiWord application itself, make is smaller, the text within your document is minimized. If you look at the screenshots below, you will notice how the text is made smaller when the AbiWord window is restored. The first screenshot shows AbiWord maximized while the second screenshot shows AbiWord restored; notice how the text is minimized in the restored screenshot. This feature is useful because you don't have to scroll sideways to view the entire text. Also shown below is MS Word restored to show the differences between the two.

Ever heard of 'Fit to page' ?

Another great feature in AbiWord is the insert field option. Under the Insert tab you can choose to insert a field such as date and time. If you choose to insert time, you will actually insert a clock into your document as the screenshot below demonstrates.

Word has this too!

Abiword doesn't even have text boxes or math equation editors yet.

I would have loved to have this application around back when I was running Windows 98 on my Compaq Presario with 64MB of RAM

Want a small, fast, Word-compatible word processor?

Try Word 97. Or hell, even Works.

Fine for Win2k except 1 by The_Hun · 2004-09-01 02:07 · Score: 2, Interesting

I use AbiWord under Windows 2k and the only thing that disturbs me is the strange spacing of some texts (maybe depends on the type of font). Anyway it works fine for me.

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The need for a grammar checker by caitsith01 · 2004-09-01 02:08 · Score: 4, Informative

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*

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Read Pynchon.

Re:The need for a grammar checker by caitsith01 · 2004-09-01 02:22 · Score: 2, Funny

I like just pasting swathes of Dickens or Melville or Shakespeare into Word and watching it all turn green and red like it's Christmas time. It's the strongest argument I can think of for lighting forest fires around Redmond in midsummer...

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Read Pynchon.
Re:The need for a grammar checker by shic · 2004-09-01 02:38 · Score: 2, Interesting

I've posted about this before...

In my opinion, YES - in quite a number of environments a grammar checker is a vital feature of a word processor. I don't want to take ultimate control away from the user but I do want an optional feature to highlight syntactic structures which are not 'straight forward'.

To all the trolls who insist that a grammar checker is a crutch which will ultimately damage the user's literary skills, all I can do is recommend you try to read some hastily written factual documents from an average office worker who does not use a grammar checker. I consider a grammar checker an essential tool - it is such a pity that the best available at the moment is Word's somewhat lack-lustre effort. I'd also welcome an extension which verifies consistent style.

Bring me any open source text-editing program that checks grammar better than word does (which shouldn't be hard - lets face it!) and I'll evangelise.
Re:The need for a grammar checker by Cereal+Box · 2004-09-01 04:47 · Score: 3, Insightful

But seriously folks... Is a grammar checker really that important a feature?

Zealotry in action. If an open source program lacks a feature that many people agree is important, it's a "stupid, useless feature that no one uses." Once said open source program implements the feature, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Its all fine and well but... by farzadb82 · 2004-09-01 02:09 · Score: 2, Funny

What most people fail to realize is that Word and its office brethren, is better, not because of its glorified feature set but rather because of its interoprability between other Windows apps and between other Office components. By this I mean that I can use the Word/Excel/PPT/Outlook automation engines from within my own code or through VBA to do stuff like producing reports, precalculated spreadsheets, etc.

Until Open Source alternatives can provide this level of functionality, MS Office and its components, will still dominate the market.

BIG SIGH by crazyhorse44 · 2004-09-01 02:12 · Score: 2, Funny

Yea yea... it should be "disable" and not "disabling". If it makes anyone feel any better next time I'm up all night drinking I'll be sure to proofread my posts before hitting the submit button. *smacks forehead*

However, I do stand by my initial assertion that the grammar checker is relatively useless for someone with a strong writing background and who regularly proofreads their work.

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. SLASHDOT: Home of the vicious nerd.

Re:I can understand hating IE and looking to repla by bizpile · 2004-09-01 02:12 · Score: 5, Insightful

...but why am I supposed to hate Word? Seems a decent product and the sharepoint shared workspaces has turned out to be real popular with my users.

If you already have Word/Office, then you shouldn't hate it. However, if you don't have it and can't afford it, then you may need an alternative. I personally can't afford MSOffice, so I go with OOo.

As you are sooo rich... by hummassa · 2004-09-01 02:26 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

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It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048

Re:Editors by Paulrothrock · 2004-09-01 02:26 · Score: 2, Interesting

Children use pico.
Men use vi.
Heroes use emacs.

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I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.

AbiWord is good by stratjakt · 2004-09-01 02:29 · Score: 5, Interesting

And OO.o really isn't that bad either.

But in every office I've been in, the app that keeps them locked into MS Office is Access.

I know there are a million and one scripting languages and database engines out there in the FOSS world. Anything available as a package that could drop in and replace Access? It would need to import it's data, make it as easy as possible to migrate it's VBA code and forms?

I've screwed around with mysql + various front ends (perl, tcl+tk, java), and it's not the same. End users need all the visual drag and drop kind of stuff, they don't want to touch code.

Access is no industrial-strength RDBMS, but it's a pretty decent for plenty of single-user data mangling, and of course the magical keyphrase is it's *easy to use*.

Doesn't matter how good AbiWord or OO.o get, until we can ditch Access, MS Office will reign in much of the business world.

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I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!

Re:Mac OS X Native Versions by mccalli · 2004-09-01 02:31 · Score: 4, Informative

OO.o and Abiword both have "experimental" Mac OS X native versions. While you can run OO.o through X11, it doesn't support things like copy-paste from non-X11 applications, something everyone uses.

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

No OASIS file format support by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-01 02:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

i love abiword, but won't use it until it supports the OASIS file format. i'm tired of have .docs, .abws, .sxws, .kwds and no common program to read them. three of them are open standards, there's no reason word, abiword, kword, and OO.o shouldn't support abw and sxw and kwd. preferably, i'd say everything should support sxw (which i'm happy to see koffice doing), but that's just my pipe dream.

Are grammar checkers that important? by ImaLamer · 2004-09-01 02:46 · Score: 2, Interesting

Seriously though look at (MS) Word's grammar checker sometime.

Not every "which" needs a comma, not every capitalized word needs to be de-capitalized, my bibliography doesn't need to form sentences...

Look at this sentence:

"The things that letter says speak volumes about how children need to feel about themselves."

Where is the error? Word tells me this is correct:

"The things that letter say speak volumes about how children need to feel about themselves."

Although two english professors say the first one is just fine. (The paper I pulled that from was for their class.)

The worst part is that you can't get the "ignore" fuction to work right. It only ignores it until you type something else in. Word doesn't recognize quotes either. If I quote someone, the grammar may just be wrong... get over it Microsoft.

Only good thing is that it recognizes extra spaces (that can't be seen during printing anyways) and other weird mistakes like "the the".

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Get your Unix fortune now!

Re:Are grammar checkers that important? by sheriff_p · 2004-09-01 04:15 · Score: 2, Insightful

Your English 'professor' may like it, but try giving it to anyone who writes for a living (or a real editor), and they'll put a nice big red line though it, being that it's mostly unreadable.

- Single 'that' when two would be clearer
- 'says' and 'speak' next to each other
- But basically: far too many words used

No wonder you pissed off Word.

If you were to rewrite it, I'd suggest:

"The letter says a great deal about how children should feel about themselves"

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Score:-1, Funny

I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, too. by Futurepower(R) · 2004-09-01 02:48 · Score: 5, Interesting

"I'd call randomly corrupting files and moving images around more than annoying quirks." Mod parent up! Exactly right.

Several people had told me about this, but I don't often use MS Word, so I have only recently seen it myself. I was working on an MS Word document, that someone else had started in Word, for about 4 hours. I saved the document frequently. Eventually I tried to save and got only an error message. MS Word would not open its own file, and would not open the backup. My work was lost, apparently.

I decided to try something I had heard about on Slashdot. I tried opening the trashed document in Open Office. No problem, it opened immediately. Then I saved the document in MS Word .DOC format, and it opened fine in Word. So, if you use MS Word, you should also install Open Office, because OO is sometimes a necessary tool to make MS Word work.

Another story: Someone gave me an MS Excel spreadsheet. I opened it in Excel, but was unable to discover how to make the row and column headings stay visible when I scrolled to the right or down. The Excel help was no help.

I opened the Excel spreadsheet in OO. The OO help was clear about how to make headings stationary. I did what it said, and saved the file as an MS Excel file. Then I opened it in MS Excel, and it worked fine. Again, OO showed that it is a very useful MS Office tool.

Re:Finding the memory usage by Sc00ter · 2004-09-01 02:50 · Score: 2, Interesting

He's talking about how much memory the program uses when it's running, not how much hard drive space it takes.

--
Free Mac Mini

Re:I can understand hating IE and looking to repla by myster0n · 2004-09-01 02:58 · Score: 3, Insightful

Exposure is also a way to donate. Show the world the benefits. And after a while you can help beginners. Beginners who started because of you. Who could become the architects of the next generation of Free Software.

It could happen.

--
Nobody believes the official spokesman, but everybody trusts an unidentified source. -- Ron Nesen

Re:I can understand hating IE and looking to repla by hankwang · 2004-09-01 03:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

but why am I supposed to hate Word? Seems a decent product and the sharepoint shared workspaces has turned out to be real popular with my users.

The output of Word usually looks horrible from a typographic point of view, at least in the default settings that most people seem to use. Some of the most obvious examples:

No hyphenation. In technical texts, a long word will stretch the inter-word whitespace, or sometimes (even uglier), the intra-word whitespace.
Breaking words on existing hyphens. Something like "an inter-word whitespace" will be broken on the hyphen. Exactly where it shouldn't since it renders it ambiguous whether the writer meant to write it as one word or as two words.
Superscripts and subscripts will create an extra gap between that line containing them and the preceding or following line. That seems to be why PhD theses that contain chemical or mathematical formulas usually are typeset with linespace 1.5, which doesn't look good either.
Mathematical equations look horrible. If you want them to look better, you'll have to buy an add-on package---the better ones are actually based on a TeX engine.
Empty space is one of the most important ingredients in proper formatting. I don't know whether Word automatically formats section headers and figure captions in long document, or that people do it by hand, but the result sucks. Numbered or bulleted lists do not have extra white above and below in order to separate them from the text. Section headers have whitespace around them that is an integer multiple of the line spacing, which is usually too tight (no empty line) or too wide (one empty line).

As you might guess: I prefer LaTeX. The basics are not that hard; someone who's writing a PhD thesis should certainly be able to get used to it within an afternoon and with the default settings you'll get typographically good formatting. Of course, it requires more effort if you want to change the default settings, but that's typically something you've to figure out just once and then you can use those style settings for similar future documents.

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Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.

Re:Finding the memory usage by YU+Nicks+NE+Way · 2004-09-01 03:20 · Score: 3, Interesting

Actually, that claim is pure FUD. The parts of IE which are "in the OS" are things like GDI -- which Firefox also uses. DLLs like MSHTML and the like are counted into the memory consumed by the process.

desktop publishing: Scribus is nice. by timothy · 2004-09-01 03:31 · Score: 2, Insightful

Scribus impresses me, so this is a note from a fan who dabbles in it; I can't compare it deeply to state-of-the-art DTP programs.

If AbiWord is slow on your machine, then I think Scribus would be, too. However, it's a very nice application which gets better (well, that is the intent, I realize ;)) with every release. They just had a major release, too, and the documentation is far better than most software's documentation in the source-secret or open-source worlds.

Is it Indesign / Quark? No, but it's also a gifthorse ;)

Right now, Scribus is more like PageMaker of a few years ago, frankly, but OTOH, can directly create PDFs and do other things which (when I last touched PageMaker, quite a while ago) PageMaker could not.

(Also, though my DTP experience is several years old now, I actually preferred PageMaker for small things; Quark I was eventually won over to, but for small things PM is just more familiar and simple to work with. YMMV ...)

timothy

--
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5

Re:I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, to by joeljkp · 2004-09-01 03:38 · Score: 2, Insightful

I agree that it takes a bit of learning to figure out how to use Word as it should be used (kind of like learning how to write proper HTML). But the parent specifically stated that he hasn't really used Word before. That was his entire point.

If a newbie tries to do something in Word and OpenOffice, and he/she finds it easier in OpenOffice, isn't that a good thing?

--
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy

Re:I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, to by Joe5678 · 2004-09-01 03:40 · Score: 4, Informative

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"

Word is not the standard, .DOC is by orasio · 2004-09-01 03:43 · Score: 2, Interesting

Word couldn't be the standard, for example, in the place I work for, because it doesn't run on SuSE or Slackware, and we just have a win 2000 as a print server (location issues).

We use Open Office 1.1.2, which does a great job in handling different versions of .DOCs, a much better job that most versions of Word I have met.

OO 1.0 was not as good, but with this version, we have had no problem whatsoever when interchanging documents with other MS-only shops, including clients.

We thought about using terminal services, and installing MS Office in the print server, should any compatibility issue occur, but the MS Office 2000 CD sits unused, because noone has needed it yet. We killed our last Win machine about the time we installed Open Office 1.1.
It is kind of hardware heavy, but that's not problem for us, many of us program Java, so we have memory to spare.
The ones who just use OO, don't have trouble either.
Heavier would be to have to dual boot Windows, or put money in licenses instead of fast hardware.

Fancy stuff by gad_zuki! · 2004-09-01 03:44 · Score: 4, Interesting

I'd like to see more fancy stuff. A simple grammar checker would be very nice. The MS one overextends and is very stylistic to say the least. Catching simple grammar errors (hey proofreading on a computer screen sucks) would be a step in the right direction.

I'd also like to see the OO.org people (and others) and the abiword people decide on one text format. I dont know which one is superior, but Word's real advantage is the ubiquity of the .doc format.

Re:Fancy stuff by weeble · 2004-09-01 05:19 · Score: 2, Informative

There is a common file format and the next release of Abiword, Kword and Open Office should all use the oasis file format:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php ?w g_abbrev=office

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Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
Re:Fancy stuff by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-01 06:42 · Score: 2, Funny

... Catching simple grammar errors ...

I think you mean grammatical errors, gammar and errors are both nouns...

or am I overextending? :-)
Re:Fancy stuff by HiThere · 2004-09-01 08:28 · Score: 2, Insightful

KWord doesn't run under MSWind, unlike both AbiWord and OpenOffice.

Well, that may be a slight exaggeration. I understand that for many versions of MSWind you can first install CygWin, and then install X Window, and then install KDE. And then you could install KWord. But the ONLY people who did that would be those *required* to have MSWind as the main OS on their computer. Everyone else would be happier running MSWind inside an emulator (VMWare?). And you've GOT to be a techie to put up with the process...including the process of getting KWord to start under MSWind. (And here I'm assuming that some experimental projects I saw a couple of years ago work and are stable now.)

So KWord won't be an MSOffice killer.

--

I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.

Re:I can understand hating IE and looking to repla by supersnail · 2004-09-01 03:57 · Score: 2, Interesting

Writing as someone who has been stuck writing large technical documents in Word I couldn't agree more.

Why most managers in most shops think a tool designed for secretaries writing memos is suitable for creating technical documents I will never know.

Worst -- we have standards for word documents. We must use yukky fonts, we must use headings that indent three tabs at each level leaving you with four inches of blank space and one inch of text.

Even worse -- we are supposed to colaberate with other departments who have a diffenrent version of word. I have struggled for hours to get a document looking sensible with the text next to the correct image, no tables/list spilt on page breaks. No chapter heading at the bottom of a page etc. Then some **** goes and changes the default font and complains about the appearance.

You are not " supposed to hate word", thats up to you, but I certainly do.

--
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.

Re:I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, to by BenjyD · 2004-09-01 04:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

What a bizarre way to do it - why would the user ever want to *not* repair the file when they try to open it?

WordPerfect 5.1 by Mongoose+Disciple · 2004-09-01 04:21 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

Re:I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, to by ScottGant · 2004-09-01 04:32 · Score: 3, Insightful

or how about NOT corrupting them in the first place? Is that possible?

And why have an option to even open and repair...shouldn't it just repair if it sees it corrupted automagically?

I left Word behind many many moons ago. I'm not looking back.

--

"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.

Re:Mac OS X Native Versions by ztirffritz · 2004-09-01 05:01 · Score: 2, Informative

OK I found it with Google... http://www.abisource.com/download/development.phtm l

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Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?

Re:I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, to by anomalous+cohort · 2004-09-01 05:15 · Score: 3, Informative

why would the user ever want to *not* repair the file when they try to open it?

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.

Re:Try oo 1.1.2 by Blakey+Rat · 2004-09-01 05:16 · Score: 3, Interesting

Revision tracking. If you can use Revision Tracking in OO 1.1.2 without OO mangling the document, you're one-up on me. I couldn't get it to work worth crap.

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Comment of the year

Re:I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, to by doublem · 2004-09-01 05:32 · Score: 3, Interesting

I agree with you.

OpenOffice is frequently used at my last job, because I showed people how to use it to open Word and Excel files that Office couldn't. I also found that some graphics intensive Word Files eat up a lot more RAM in Office than in OpenOffice. We received a series of documents from a client. The client has pushed their 3GHz machines with 2 Gig of RAM to the limit creating the file, and we could NOT work with the resulting files in Word.

Then I opened the files in OpenOffice and Abiword, both of which were able to let us work with the files and do what we needed to do.

The formatting wasn't that complex, the issue was all the graphics used in the documents.

Word crapped out, and took 45 minutes to copy segments of text to the clipboard.

The other apps let us use the files easily, and made it possible to copy and paste text out of them. (The people who needed the files were loading the content into an Online Learning system.)

Abiword and OpenOffice are now standard installs for people in the content department, as well as on a couple machines in the Sales department. Not even Office XP's restore and recovery functions work as well.

--
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA

Re:I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, to by LordIvan · 2004-09-01 05:39 · Score: 2, Informative

"Another story: Someone gave me an MS Excel spreadsheet. I opened it in Excel, but was unable to discover how to make the row and column headings stay visible when I scrolled to the right or down. The Excel help was no help."

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.)

Re:I can understand hating IE and looking to repla by miskatonic+alumnus · 2004-09-01 05:41 · Score: 3, Interesting

I agree. I teach mathematics, and have to prepare exams with equations, etc. Word does a crappy job of formatting equations. Whenever I use word, I feel like I'm sitting at a typewriter, with someone standing beside me who waves a dictionary in my face, randomly strikes keys on the typewriter, and yanks the paper out before I'm finished --- the word-processor is fighting me every step of the way. Finally, I gave up, and decided to write the exams by hand: because it was quicker to do it that way. That is, until I learned LaTeX.

I've had similar experiences with Excel. I used MS Works at home to enter my students grades. I saved it as a few different flavors of Excel, none of which would display on the most recent version of Excel on the computers at school. Frustrating.

What's sad is that at my college, the computers are brand new and loaded with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, you name it --- Microsoft. And yet, the only use they are to me is to print out PDF's using the freely available Acrobat Reader. They can't even display a postscript file.

I no longer use MS products for work --- Not because I hate Bill Gates, not because MS is a convicted monopolist, not because I am a Linux zealot. I don't use them because they cannot do what I need them to do.

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