AbiWord 2.2 Unleashed

uwog writes "AbiWord 2.2 marks a new milestone in the life of our beloved Ant. With a native port to MacOSX, and new features such as live updating tables of contents and TextBox support, Abi is finally a grown up Ant. Read the full announcement or go grab your own copy."

Comments

I like Abiword....

[adoarns]

if for no other reason than it doesn't take five minutes to start up.

Re:I like Abiword....

[Ann Coulter]

If it takes ten minutes to start up, it also takes five minutes to start up. Sorry to be pedantic.

Re:I like Abiword....

[Anonymous Coward]

By that argument it would be ready in 5 minutes, which wouldn't be true. It still has another five minutes until it's done starting up.

Re:I like Abiword....

[MikeXpop]

Hey, I'm not alone!

That's the main reason I use abiword. A lot of my friends who use OSS prefer OOo Writer, but I don't see why. Abiword has all the features of Word that I need, but absolutely none of the bloat. It's also one of the few open sourced programs* I can feel confident recommending to my non-geek friends, and that's saying a lot.

*The others being Firefox and gaim

Re:I like Abiword....

[KingPunk]

i too like abiword, but if you prelink your libraries and stuff,
with OOo you'd see a significant response time jump.
and another big issue with abiword is that it more often than not,
doesn't read or make compatable MS Documents.
...which sucks in any really "productive" enviroment.

just thought i'd add my $0.02
--kingpunk

Re:I like Abiword....

[n4t3]

I've been using 2.2.0 for a few weeks after receiving a link to it from the Abisource team (I reported a problem which the new version fixed) and I've been comparing it with MS Office v.X Word on my 700MHz iBook. I've had troubles with images in AbiWord. I won't go into it but suffice to say I haven't had good luck opening doc files with images. It also seems to have problems with long documents - it really bogs down compared to Word. The fonts are really nice and crisp though on my machine, nicer than my version of Word (admitedly not the latest version of Word). Abiword does still crash occassionally on my OSX10.3.6 though less than in past versions. I will continue to follow AbiWord as it clearly has promise, but its still not replacing Word for me yet.

Re:I like Abiword....

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a shame as I might have looked at it as an alternative to OOo which is having a problem with numbering in a template I need to use, but the document has a lot of images in (OOo also has issues with the images). Mind you, even MS Office has problems with the numbering in a template and its numbering generation tools seem to have serious bugs anyway. I suspect the problem lies with the MS format somewhere.

Re:I like Abiword....

[Infinityis]

Technically, it takes more like 600 seconds to start up. Sorry to be redundant.

Re:I like Abiword....

[downhole]

I just grabbed it and tried it with a few documents. So far, it doesn't seem to like images. It didn't display them in simpler documents, and died on a complex one On the plus side, it's smaller and faster then anything else (except maybe TextEdit), and appears to work fine with text and tables. I appreciate the simplicity too - it's nice to have a functional word processor that doesn't try to do everything under the sun. The real test, though, is interoperability with most versions of MS Word.

Re:I like Abiword....

[Anonymous Coward]

i just recently compiled abiword-2.0.14 from source on slackware-10 and it launches as fast as a simple text editor like xedit or gedit, plenty quick, i love abiword, i will wait a few hours and late this evening i will download 2.2.1 and will compile it from source using a different prefix so i do not overwrite 2.0.14 and compare the two...

Re:I like Abiword....

[bigberk]

if for no other reason than it doesn't take five minutes to start up.

What takes five minutes to start up? If you mean OpenOffice.org, it takes exactly 20 seconds to start up on my 1 GHz desktop, and after that it's nimble as anything else.

Abiword doesn't work for me because it just isn't stable under Windows. Out of curiosity (to see whether support for OpenOffice's document format existed yet) I tried using Abiword 2.2 to open an OpenOffice generated xml file. The software crashed without a trace - no error message, no warning, not even an exception message. It's this kind of crashing that has made me ditch Abiword on Windows (fine on Linux though).

I'm not saying the stability can't be fixed, but all of the 2.x releases I've tried - including 2.2, have proved to be unstable on my awfully stable Windows 2000 system. On the other hand, I have yet to see OpenOffice.org crash on either Linux or Windows (or SunOS for that matter).

Re:I like Abiword....

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of my friends who use OSS prefer OOo Writer, but I don't see why.

because it doesn't crash. i have lost documents several times with abiword (on windows) and there's absolutely nothing worse, imho, than that. I would rather have a slightly bloated application (oo) than one which loses my work.

Re:I like Abiword....

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither does Openoffice most of the time :(

Even its .rtf's render differently in word.

Re:I like Abiword....

[Taladar]

I guess you mean "production environment". Most "productive" environments don't use any of the *Word Programs.

Re:I like Abiword....

[KingPunk]

im sure you know what i meant, but let me be more direct:
what i meant was, it isn't exactly being productive,
if you're waiting like 20seconds for a word processing application to start up
and yes, there are many productive enviroments, that use *Word Programs,
but one mans productive, is another mans counter-production.

--kingpunk

Re:I like Abiword....

[Anonymous Coward]

> doesn't read or make compatable MS Documents

Uh-huh... So you eat your word documents?

Re:I like Abiword....

[Anonymous Coward]

No, if it takes 10 minutes to start up, it takes *at least* five minutes to start up. When someone someone says "It takes x minutes", they mean

Time it takes == x

not

Time it takes >= x.

Must suck to be as dumb as you.

Re:I like Abiword....

[deaddrunk]

The majority of productive environments use Word because it works.

Re:I like Abiword....

[bob65]

If you mean OpenOffice.org, it takes exactly 20 seconds to start up on my 1 GHz desktop, and after that it's nimble as anything else.p. Which, while not 5 minutes, is still unacceptably slow, unless you're starting a 5-hour essay writing session, in which 20 seconds is insignificant.

Re:I like Abiword....

[jrockway]

No, they use LaTeX because all you do is type your document and not worry about formatting.

How can anyone be productive in an environment where C-a doesn't take you to the start of the line and C-t doesn't transpose characters? Screw word... long live emacs and LaTeX :)

Re:I like Abiword....

[udippel]

... At times, yes, I do like Abiword.
But my impression of their support isn't as great.
There was a situation one day when all chars were overwritten instead of inserted.
Ah, yes, you'll tell me to change to Insert. But where ?? It took me a few minutes to find the switch. Very cumbersome.
I'll tell you a secret: No, it is not the 0 [Ins] on the numeric keypad, like anywhere else.
I thought it to be a bug and filed one. I was kind of pee-d at and told WONTFIX.

So far as usability and compatibility are taken serious.

Re:I like Abiword....

[spectre_240sx]

I have nothing against Abiword, and the fact that there is a native OS X port of it definately sits well with me, but my chief concern at the moment is compatibility; both short and long term. Personally I see OO.o as the most likely to stay around right now. I may be wrong about that, and if anyone has information to the contrary I'm more than willing to listen, but the fact that it is a full office suite which runs on 2.5 of the 3 operating systems that I deal with makes me feel secure in using it.

My logic may be flawed, but hopefully it will help you to understand why some use OO.o.

Re:I like Abiword....

[tessdfield]

You would have to press shift + 0 on the numpad. And it was marked WONTFIX because it's not a bug; insert and overwrite modes are present in most word processors (AbiWord even changes the caret color to make this distinction even more clear).

Re:I like Abiword....

[b17bmbr]

since abi is open source, it will stay around indefinitely. in fact, abi was once a commercial project, but has done better as OSS. most people need nothing more than a good WP. how many people need a spreadsheet or presentation program? but how many people need to write grandma a thankyou letter for christmas? abi's size is a plus. there is not one tool that works for everything. okay, emacs!!

Re:I like Abiword....

[at_slashdot]

I switched to Abiword exactly because of that reason. However I discovered oooqs program (OOo Quick Starter) for KDE and I switched back to OOo. OpenOffice starts now in 2 seconds, that's good enough for me.

Re:I like Abiword....

[udippel]

See ... !
This is what I call a decent lack on compatibility. It's the first wordprocessor I personally use where you have to go like this. Flame me for lack of exposure, if you like.

The carat was what I liked, by the way. And what I wrote in my post. I'd be all out for Abiword (and actually advocated for and use it for small tasks not involving WORD-import).

Your answer signals a clear weakness on UI. "insert and overwrite modes are present in most word processors". Fine. So to me. But don't make the user learn exotic keybindings if you want to make them converts. And will you please stick to the argument. At no point did I ask to do away with insert and overwrite.

I don't have the post here any more, but if I'm not mistaken, I also mentioned the lack to switch through usage of the menu. At least I didn't find that option then. In the end trial and error brought the solution: the 'Insert' key of the cursor-pad works as expected; without Shift +.

Shall everyone draw his / her own conclusion about the level of HCI involved here.

Re:I like Abiword....

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Actually it is (just like MS Word) the "Insert" key. I just opened up both Abiword and MS Word to test them both. Interestingly enough, although "Insert" toggles in both, MS Help suggest I go to Tools/Options and use a checkbox to toggle overwrite (!), or double click on the "ovr" on the statusbar. Strange stuff. Also, Abiword does load a lot faster, even with the Office Toolbar preloading for Word. I noticed also that the toolbar uses more RAM than Abiword.

Re:I like Abiword....

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Just tested this, myself. OpenOffice's .sxw file format isn't listed, so I choose "all files", and sure enough it opened. It looked funny, though! No crash. Hasn't hiccuped or blushed even at all, so far. The imported tools also seem solid, so far. (Of course this is on WinXP.)

Re:I like Abiword....

[udippel]

Thanks for the update. I just checked, and by now it does (toggle with Ins on numeric keypad) !
So, finally someone brought it into line with the rest of the world !

It is quite another discussion if it should toggle from the statusbar. To be discussed elsewhere.

Another plus and thumbs-up for Abiword !

Re:I like Abiword....

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck..are you serious? You didn't know what the Insert key did? The Insert key that has been on PC keyboards since the AT keyboard on the IBM PC/AT? The Insert key that does exactly the same thing that you're complaining about in every word processor ever released on the PC under any Operating System from Wordstar to Microsoft Word XP?

So your complaint is that the original IBM PC/AT designers didn't label that button "TURN OFF OVERWRITE-MODE IN YOUR WORD PROCESSOR YOU FUCKING MORON! HERE! PRESS THIS KEY, KNOBHEAD!"? Because this is essentially your point.

Re:I like Abiword....

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know how often Microsoft changed the rtf file format ? Try to load rtf files from a recent Word version within an older Word version and you'll see that this cannot be an argument...

Re:I like Abiword....

[Anonymous Coward]

In some cases Abiword is faster to start than the splash screen, so if those miliseconds matter to you be sure to use abiword with the No Splash option

-n --nosplash

Re:I like Abiword....

[KingPunk]

and if they wanted compatability with other companies who do use word/spreadsheets, etc
they're sup feces creek eh?
but you're right. i was just sticking to word-releated though,
as that is the topic! ;)

localized fonts?

[Janek Kozicki]

last time I checked (1.7 version), Abiword had terrible problems with fonts, especially with country-specific characters.

If you are non-english person - how's Abiword working for you?

Re:localized fonts?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm non-english.. I'm american, works good! Enjoy your tea and crumpets.

Re:localized fonts?

[tessdfield]

Well, the Windows version uses uniscribe by default now, so the situation may have improved (1.x was quite a while ago too, so if you're on unix it will have improved there as well). There are some known issues with bidi support on Mac OS X and there are also known issues with Arabic, Indic, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese scripts, but that's because no one has volunteered to assist the developers in improving the existing support.

Re:localized fonts?

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

Quoting the article, which you appear not to have read:
Among the new features in AbiWord 2.2 are:

* A MacOSX port
* Tables of contents
* Document history/revisions
* Text frames
* Better support for international scripts and locales
* List folding
* Text wrapping around images
* Faster rendering
* Dashboard integration
* Visual drag and drop

This release also includes an enormous number of bug fixes and improvements across the board.

Re:localized fonts?

[InfiniteWisdom]

And that explains what? "Better" in itself doesn't mean a damn thing. The grandparent was asking for people who have had actual experiences with using Abiword for non-English text, not a nebulous bullet-item.

Re:localized fonts?

[rduke15]

It does seem to support Unicode on Windows now.

Re:localized fonts?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are non-english person - how's Abiword working for you?

Benisimo!

Re:localized fonts?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aint working to perfectly with right-to-left languages as it seems not being able to write right-to-left, it just writes from the left to left.. When it comes to actually printing non-english characters it works without a hitch (to useless for right-to-left languages as you will be writing backwards...)

Re:localized fonts?

[jessONslash]

The older vesion 2.0.6 could not handle Urdu (Nafees web) fonts. Abi could display individual characters, but could not join them. I have not checked this version. The KDE apps do handle these fonts well, whereas Gnome apps fail (firefox even with pango enabled). Interestingly, Gaim does a much better job, but has a problem with a few characters. For Urdu, KDE is the way to go.

Re:localized fonts?

[gnarlin]

Not to good. I'm Icelandic. I can mostly happily write the documents (along with the following Icelandic characters ð ö æ ó á é ú ý etc.), but everytime I try to print any file containing Icelandic character the program creates a tab space behind every one of those characters. Really wierd and frustrating.

Re:localized fonts?

[tessdfield]

Are you printing from the command line? (this sounds like Bug 7363, by the way)

Re:localized fonts?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm american, works good!

Guatemalan? Mexican? Peruivan? Inuit? Depending on which part of america you are from, umlauts might apply or not.

Re:localized fonts?

[Fallen Andy]

Sorry, but this sort of trolls me a bit. Im english from the UK, and have written an app which has 10's of thousands of copies here in greece (a greek/english dictionary). I wish you US folks would recognise (when u design stuff) that there is another world out there.

My app was *asked for* by MS's localization people. Six months later the MSDN official stuff
for greek was (well we scored 100% to my extreme surprise)...

Nuff said.

Please don't be so limited when you write apps. Think global...

Even if only one copy lives in another part of the planet nothing compares with the buzz of knowing you made something really global....
(I may be poor, but I love the idea that someone
half a planet away is using my app to teach his kids his own language)

Re:localized fonts?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not exactly sure what your saying, but I can understand your point if you mean it is naive of people to use 7-bit ASCII and hard code strings, but as far as localization goes it is more than just recognizing that a world exists outside of their own.

I don't know the first thing about the Greek language, so yes, I should write the program to allow for localization, but I don't think it should be my responsibility to try to cater to every single country that might use my software.

Re:localized fonts?

[Fallen Andy]

I'd agree with you absolutely. But , I figured (living in greece) that I had to make the transition from naive dumb UK english attitudes to more european and nay verily global ones. It isn't easy to do this. Greece makes europe as a whole easy because like some of the other balkan countries they don't use the latin alphabet. That helps a bit.

It's only 10 million people here so I always understand if we are overlooked, but I try. If you design for at least europe + US then you are doing pretty well. Languages that read right to left (arabic etc) and asia are much harder, and I haven't tried to tackle them yet. I guess I will some day...

But never feel ashamed that you can't hit everyone. It takes time. I haven't got there yet and I wish I could (love to hit my friends in bulgaria etc in cyrillic, but still working on it).

It takes time. It helps if you think more internationally at the design stage though. I managed mostly by accident (next time it won't be...).

There. Nobody said we weren't honest on this here forum. And (never start a sentence with and...) it is your responsibility if you are designing the program. Slap wrists time. Hey, so you are coding it too? Big deal... (no offence i hope)

Rgds,
Andy

Re:localized fonts?

[Reteo Varala]

Only in America do they mod a joke as insightful...

Re:localized fonts?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

And here I was thinking Slashdot was the place for people to yell "USAian." Now we've got people implicitly including US/America as "English"? Cool.

Re:localized fonts?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

"Internationalization

Since not everyone in the world speaks the same language, AbiWord comes in many different languages. AbiWord is available in most common and many not-so-common languages.

Make sure your document contains none of those nasty spelling errors by using AbiWord's built-in spelling checker. Dictionaries exist for over 30 languages.

AbiWord supports right-to-left, left-to-right, and mixed-mode text. This means that in addition to supporting European languages, AbiWord supports languages like Hebrew and Arabic as well."

Re:localized fonts?

[yanestra]

Everytime (really everytime) I tried AbiWord, it crashed. I type six sentences or so, do a little formatting, all with my standard fonts, which include German, Polish, Hindi and Gujarati (they are just present - not used in that document), and ...barf.

It's not that the print looks lousy, I don't get that far.

I am always surprised when them development people again and again announce "more stability". I guess they have a different kind of measurement system.

Re:localized fonts?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Did you try "Tools/Set Language" and then Greek? I set my font to "Times New Greek", and its fast and pretty.

http://zsigri.tripod.com/fontboard/wplinks.html#ab iword
AbiWord BiDi

An open-source word processor with many features, including autotext and overline. Read how you can type Arabic, Cyrillic, or Hebrew. Users of Windows 95/98/ME need a third-party CJK enabler such as NJStar Communicator or AsianSuite X2 to input Chinese, Japanese or Korean.

http://zsigri.tripod.com/fontboard/arabic.html

Windows 2000 and XP support right-to-left languages at the system level.
Users of Windows 95, 98 or ME can type right-to-left in bidirectional applications such as

• Browsers and Email Clients
• Internet Explorer and Outlook Express 5.01 or later
• Mozilla 1.0 or later
• Netscape6.2 or later

• Word Processors and Text Editors
• Microsoft Word 2000 or XP
• WordPad for Windows Millenium
• WordPad for Windows 98 with the RichEdit3.0 update
• AbiWord BiDi
• DingDang Write 2000
• Sharmahd Computing UniPad

Re:localized fonts?

[Anonymous Coward]

last time I checked (1.7 version)

From looking at the Abiword Bugzilla it doesn't look like there has ever been a version 1.7 of abiword although one of the earliest version widely available in 2000 was 0.7

Until Abiword version 1.2 there were problems with Fonts because abiword was a What you see is what you get (WYSIWIG) Word Processor and needed to use fonts that would look as good when printed as they did onscreen which dramatically limited the amounts of fonts that could be used and resulted in other problems too.

The abiword developers desperately need the help from users of non-English and non-Latin alphabets as it is extremely hard for them or any one who doesn't know the languages to figure out if Hebrew, or Arabic or Asian scripts are displaying correctly.

Please do get involved, you do not need to be a programmer, all that you need is to be willing to be patient and be able to explain in great detail what is not working correctly and how it should look.

Thanks for using Abiword.

Sincerely

Abi-nonymous

Re:localized fonts?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am pretty sure non of the Abiword Developers understand Urdu and any help you can provide would be appreciated.
Detailed bug reports on how this doesn't work and how it should work would be very helpful.
If you can provide screenshots comparing how abiword fails and other applications work correctly it would be very helpful, particulary if those other applications also use some of the same toolkits and libraries as abiword like Firefox and Gaim which you have already mentioned.

Please do get involved, please help us to help you.

Thanks for using abiword.

Abi-nonymous

Re:localized fonts?

[ReinoutS]

I am always surprised when them development people again and again announce "more stability". I guess they have a different kind of measurement system.

I guess their only kind of measurement they have, is if they fixed the bugs of the people that reported them. I trust you filed your crashers, so they should be taken care of now...

Re:localized fonts?

[yanestra]

I am always surprised when them development people again and again announce "more stability". I guess they have a different kind of measurement system.

I guess their only kind of measurement they have, is if they fixed the bugs of the people that reported them. I trust you filed your crashers, so they should be taken care of now...

Sigh. Have you ever tried to file a bug that reads "crashed for unknown reason, partly reproducible"? I mean, maybe you have got the time to fetch the most recent binary with the debugging information and start hunting for the bug. Because if you don't, the people will tell you their opinion about such silly bug filings.

Re:localized fonts?

[EmagGeek]

Whenever designing a product, whether it be hardware or software, one of the very first steps is to define your target market.

If I am writing a piece of software, and my Target Market is the United States, I'm a) not going to go out of my way to make it usable in Elbonia and b) not going to give a flip if Elbonians don't like that.

"Unleashed"

[Anonymous Coward]

this whole macho rambo attitude with words like "unleashed" and software "to do battle" is partially why OSS still isn't mainstream. This is not a teen male fantasy game.

Re:"Unleashed"

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly you haven't read much corporate software marketing recently.

Re:"Unleashed"

[Lispy]

"This is not a teen male fantasy game."

But, hey, this is /.

Re:"Unleashed"

[NotoriousQ]

It could be worse. It could have escaped leaving a bloody trail of dead programmers and users.

Re:"Unleashed"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right. OSS promoters need to go more mainstream. For example, they could jump up and down like a monkey and scream "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!"

Re:"Unleashed"

[gryphon_church]

Frankenstien: And what was his name Egor?
Igor: Abby something. Abby - - Normal, I think.

Re:"Unleashed"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, like "XP Reloaded".

Re:"Unleashed"

[Narchie Troll]

Really? Reading most software ad copy makes it sound like the software is literally going to pop out of the computer and fuck me in the ass. Bleeding with testosterone in every thrust.

Re:"Unleashed"

[Anonymous Coward]

this whole macho rambo attitude with words like "unleashed" and software "to do battle" is partially why OSS still isn't mainstream. This is not a teen male fantasy game.

"Suddenly, everything rocks."
-- Microsoft Advertisement, Windows XP.

"All your database are belong to us."
-- Microsoft Tagline, SQL Server 2000.

"Microsoft: that starchy, mainstream attitude for the pasty white grown-up in a pasty white shirt in a pasty white cubicle doing a pasty white middle-manager's job. Accept no team male fantasy substitutes."
-- brought to you by the wage-slave division of the DHS.

Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[ShatteredDream]

The appeal of Office suites is that you can create a document of some kind in one, and import data from another component. With OpenOffice, KOffice and Microsoft Office you have a pretty robust toolset for creating documents with mixed data. Where is AbiWord going to go along these lines? Are we going to see "AbiExcel?"

I seem to remember that in the beginning, the group was going to put out an entire office suite, but then got bogged down just trying to create the word processing component. A small and dedicated userbase, aside does Abiword have a future without these other components?

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[tessdfield]

AbiSource will integrate AbiWord with other GNOME Office apps instead of creating a new spreadsheet (Gnumeric), presentation (Criawips), or database (GNOME-DB) component.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[poofyhairguy82]

First of all, Abiword is part of an office suite: gnome-office.

Are we going to see "AbiExcel?"

How about Gnumeric?.

But does it matter is Abiword is part of a suite? I use it on Linux because I need a good Word Processor, and Abiword takes less overhead and looks better than the OO writer. But each to his own...

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[ScrewMaster]

I vote for AbiPoint.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The goal of Gnumeric is to be the best possibly spreadsheet."

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[msevior]

No Need for AbiExcel. Gnumeric is the spreadsheet of gnome-office and we will continues to improve integration with it. Gnumeric now works well on Windows. Other gnome-office type apps will bubble out of the GNOME incubator into the rest of the world too.

For now Abiword copies and pastes nices with gnumeric. Select a region in gnumeric, copy, paste into word, you get a nice table containing Gnumeric's contents.

Not full embedding yet but we'll get there.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[frostman]

Yes, for writers.

Not technical writers, but writer-writers: journalists, novelists, what have you.

The keys are to support all OS's, full unicode and manymany languages, and the features actual writers need.

One of the things I dislike about MS Word (2000) is that soooooo many of its features are geared towards, well, office document production.

That makes perfect sense for the bulk of their market, but whenever I find myself writing, say, a non-technical magazine article, it makes me want to scream.

Plus it's a resource hog, but having not used Abi yet I don't want to make bets on that front ;-)

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[bcrowell]

I tried using KWord for a while this year, and it just wasn't very good -- constant crashes (as well as various other issues). OpenOffice is just way too bloated, and the licensing issues are a real hassle (especially since I run FreeBSD -- just installing Java on FreeBSD is a hassle due to licensing issues).

The basic problem with the ${foo}Office suites is that they run counter to one of the basic principles of good software design, which is to write a small tool that does one job really well.

Another thing I hate about both the KDE apps and MS Office is that they think they're smart enough to read my mind. Word thinks it knows when I'm writing a numbered list. KNode insisted on opening KWallet for me every time I started it up.

Really, the best all-around word processor is TeX, but AbiWord seems like the best tool I've found so far for little quick jobs where TeX would be too much trouble.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[damiam]

Am I right in thinking that Abiword on Windows uses native Windows controls, but gnumeric still uses GTK? Does that make it harder to integrate them under Windows.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Taladar]

If you write books you really should try Docbook. It is relatively easy to learn (compared to Tex) and allows you to concentrate on the content. Later you can write and tinker with a stylesheet or let your publisher do that for you since it separates content and layout completely.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[legirons]

"The appeal of Office suites is that you can create a document of some kind in one, and import data from another component."

Is this a corollary of "Every program attempts to expand until it can send and receive email"?

i.e. "every word processor attempts to expand until it takes longer to load the program that it does to create the document", in the style of the office-suites you mention?

And with people asking about .DOC support - we don't care any more! Word files might have been a popular discussion 4 years ago, but OOo solved that problem, and if you haven't already switched to an Open format, you're never going to muster the corporate enthusiasm to do so before you all get ensnared by the "patented Word format" trap being set for 3 years' hence.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Calroth]

Really, the best all-around word processor is TeX, but AbiWord seems like the best tool I've found so far for little quick jobs where TeX would be too much trouble.

For most of the power of TeX without a lot of the hassle, try LyX. It's a graphical front-end for LaTeX, with an interface akin to a word processor. However, it still applies TeX philosophy, namely, you supply the content and it will supply the layout, you don't need to mess with that.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Conglomerate.org, it's a frontend for docbook that doesn't look half bad.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[tessdfield]

Yes, the win32 port of AbiWord uses native controls, not sure about Gnumeric though (I guess you could test it out yourself, with their win32 RC1).

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Chris L. Mason]

"...Abiword is part of an office suite: gnome-office

I thought it was a part of an office suite called abisuite.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[bcrowell]

Here's what I have in my notes from when I tried LyX:

• To get good-looking PDF output (not ugly bitmapped fonts), Edit>Preferences>Outputs, change dvips to dvips -Ppdf. Actually, this doesn't help; still looks bad in xpdf, even worse in acroread. Also, uses yukky nonstandard widgets with nonstandard behaviors.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Calroth]

To get good-looking PDF output (not ugly bitmapped fonts)...

Well, for what it's worth, to get good-looking PDF output, I suggest dvipdf. It's all anti-aliased, etc. etc. and looks fine in Acrobat Reader, etc. Output from dvips looks good when printed, which you'd expect, since it outputs a PostScript file.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[rice_burners_suck]

With OpenOffice, KOffice and Microsoft Office you have a pretty robust toolset...

Correction: With OpenOffice and KOffice, you have a pretty robust toolset. With Microsoft Office, you have an ugly crash-prone unreliable and slow headacheset.

Other than that, you are correct.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Coryoth]

To get good looking PDF output out of a LaTeX document (whihc is all LyX produces really) you ought to be using pdflatex, which goes straight from LaTeX to PDF, no intermediary DVI form. If you include useful modules like hyperlinks you can automatically create document structure links for Acrobat to read, as well as having all your ref's and cite's be clickable links within the PDF. As an added bonus pdflatex supports jpg and png image types, so there's no messing around with converting your images to eps.

Jedidiah.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[oldosadmin]

OpenOffice is just way too bloated, and the licensing issues are a real hassle (especially since I run FreeBSD -- just installing Java on FreeBSD is a hassle due to licensing issues).

Are you trolling, or just ignorant?

OpenOffice.org is LGPL licensed. LGPL is GPL compatible. It only requires java for a small number of functions (I've never used any of them).

Stop spreading FUD please, we're already fighting MS hard enough.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[msevior]

AbiWord uses native windows controls. Gnumeric doesn't but the gtk-WIMP theme makes it look very, very like a native windows app.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, gnumeric does not work "well" on Windows. The port is brand new, still in alpha stage, and acts like it. There's a helluva lot missing and broken in the gnumeric port to win32. That said, kudos to the developers (mg, dom, jody, ivan, acuster, et al) who brought it there and continue to make improvements.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[bcrowell]

I normally do use pdftex/pdflatex, although certain TeXish software (e.g., lilypond), only works with the original ps-flavored tex/latex. It is possible to get good PDF output (no ugly bitmapped fonts) from latex/dvips, the incantation being something like this:

latex foo.tex
dvips -Ppdf foo
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile="foo.pdf" -c .setpdfwrite - <foo.ps

Is it possible to put commands like that in LyX (I don't have LyX installed at the moment), or do you have to use pdftex with LyX to get good PDF output? It just seemed kind of sad to me that the default in LyX was not to produce reasonable output (i.e., output that doesn't look horrible in the PDF reader used by 99% of all users).

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Coryoth]

No idea as to what you can make LyX do i'm afraid - I use Kile which most certainly does let you do things like that if you so choose. Sorry I couldn't be more help.

Jedidiah.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Gnumeric changed their page within the past week.

I needed a free spreadsheet for Windows this Tuesday for a teacher's computer (Excel was broken, and it's a statistics class, so...). I couldn't see any Windows build of Gnumeric.

Now I see a release candidate. That's a good step, but why weren't there Windows builds earlier? I haven't seen any reasonable price-free spreadsheet for Windows - other than OpenOffice.org, which takes more time to download than I had available. I ended up trying some random Win3.1 freeware.

Incidentally, why can't you just download the OOo spreadsheet (or any component) apart from the whole suite?

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Spoing]

1. Now I see a release candidate. That's a good step, but why weren't there Windows builds earlier? I haven't seen any reasonable price-free spreadsheet for Windows - other than OpenOffice.org, which takes more time to download than I had available. I ended up trying some random Win3.1 freeware.

The Windows release candidate is 1.3.92 -- libraries included.

The version I can get right now under Fedora Core 2 is 1.2.8 unless I want to go through a long list of libraries to compile manually on top of the main application itself.

Sounds like the developers are working hard on the Windows port. You can lend them a hand if you want it any sooner, of course.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[tyrione]

I dig LyX but I have switched to Kile LaTeX Editor (KDE Project) due to the skeletal support of the Memoir Class within LyX, amongst various other classes that may not be as commonly requested and therefore aren't natively supported in LyX. Both are wonderful applications.

I equate LyX and its WYSIWYM to be getting better yet too often I have to insert ERT and so I decided to just learn LaTeX directly and write in Kile. I build chapter templates quite simply with Kile. Customizing the appearance of output in Kile and its Master-Document Hierarchy is smooth. The Preamble hastles in LyX that most often are due to lack of documentation aren't evident in Kile.

Kile is a sweet front-end with many difficulties in LaTeX accounted for through wizards and other special templates.

And I've yet to worry about pdf output with Kile on Debian.

I'm looking forward to LyX 1.4 and hope it lives up to the redesign promises.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Narchie Troll]

How is XForms nonstandard? Since when is any given toolkit a standard?

There's a Qt port now anyway.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Nurgled]

Of course, if you want to embed figures which actually scale and render properly like the text, you have to screw around trying to get your diagrams in PDF format. In theory that would be easy, but with so few applications going direct to PDF, and with tools that really seem to have a hard time converting EPS to PDF (I've only had GhostScript succeed once, on a really basic document with no text) it becomes quite hellish to author a decent document with pdflatex.

Having said all that, I still use pdflatex regularly, and continue to search for good solutions for producing figures and/or a good (command-line driven) PostScript to PDF conversion tool.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a good step, but why weren't there Windows builds earlier?

'cause it was really really unstable and the developers knew very well how unstable it was.
releasing even testing binaries in that state could have been damaging to gnumerics reputation and counterproductive so they waited until they were able to make Gnumeric for Windows reasonably usable before publicising it.

Can't wait to try out Gnumeric for windows, I had heard rumour of a windows port for months and kept checking back every so often to see if anything had been released yet.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Do one thing well

To be fair to KDE they do a fairly good job of seperating out components and reusing standard libraries. Gnome does not make anywhere near the same use of Bonobo as KDE does of KParts.

The do one thing well maxim applies to old Unix utilites which had the benefit of pipes | which allowed yout to do one thing well but then them join together into much more powerful tools.
Gnome has a lot of low level libraries which try to do one thing well (like librsvg) which appliction developers join together to make more useful applcitoins (abiword uses librsvg to allow embedded SVG images). Similarly KDE uses variousl KParts which try to do one thing well and integrates them together into an integrated office suite.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Anonymous Coward]

The appeal of Office suites is that you can create a document of some kind in one, and import data from another component.

Really? I thought that the appeal of office suites is that you rarely find standalone word processors. I strongly suspect most people wouldn't even notice if compound documents went away.

A small and dedicated userbase, aside does Abiword have a future without these other components?

Think about all the secretaries typing things up, all the students writing papers, etc... do you really think most people want to stick spreadsheets and presentations into their word processor documents? It's a niche market. An important niche market, I'll give you that, but hardly typical use.

Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the output looks horrible in acroread the problem is your choice of fonts. I don't have my standard latex template here but you need to use the package for postscript fonts - try \usepackage{pslatex} in your preamble.

The issue is that by default latex uses bitmapped fonts (postscript type 3 if I remember correctly) that tend to look like crap on screen (but print nicely). pslatex fonts are scalable type 1 fonts and will work well both on screen and printed. A google search on latex +pdf +fonts will probably provide you with some good info.

Rockin' Az

What's the point

[Anonymous Coward]

now that we have OpenOffice?
Also, aren't word processors kind of backwards compared to typesetting systems?

Re:What's the point

[tessdfield]

OpenOffice.org is resource heavy and doesn't support Windows 95 (any longer), for one.

Re:What's the point

[Anonymous Coward]

who cares about windows? it's not even free software.

Re:What's the point

[tessdfield]

I don't follow - because it's not free, it's irrelevant?

Re:What's the point

[Anonymous Coward]

95 is dead, no more , gone, get over it. Even Microsoft say so. You are on your own.

Re:What's the point

[tessdfield]

That's understandable on Microsoft's part, but that doesn't mean all the Windows 95 installations (especially in poorer countries) will disappear as fast as the support.

Re:What's the point

[Lord Kano]

Choice.

I really dig OpenOffice and I'll probably never use AbiWord, but I think it's great that it's out there.

LK

Re:What's the point

[Anonymous Coward]

imaging if linux devs had said "what's the point in having linux now that we have windows"

what a nasty thought.

Re:What's the point

[Yaztromo]

What's the point now that we have OpenOffice?

Define "we".

Ever try to run OpenOffice on Mac OSX? It's not pleasant. Instead of using the native Aqua widgets, it uses X-Windows widgets, and requires you to run the X-Windows subsystem in order to run.

It works, but it's not terribly pleasant, and doesn't integrate well with the rest of the system. AbiWord, for all of its warts, is significantly better integrated into the OS.

I'm looking forward to the day when OpenOffice has a proper OSX distribution, but for now Abiword is a much nicer open word processor if you're running a Mac.

Yaz.

Re:What's the point

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice.org --- Windows: 45 MB | Linux: 77 MB | Solaris (S): 88 MB | Solaris (I): 78 MB

AbiWord --- OS X: 4.88 MB | Windows: 4.77 MB | Linux: 3.45 MB

Re:What's the point

[Blakey Rat]

Two simple replies:

1) MacOS X doesn't have a port of OpenOffice, so making a native Abiword release is newsworthy. To my knowledge, it's the first open-source word processor to have a MacOS X port. (Yes, OpenOffice *kind* of runs in x11 on MacOS X, but it's nowhere close to usable.)

2) Modern word processors are all closer to typesetters than they are to typewriters. Read the excellent book, "The Macintosh Is Not A Typewriter" for an explanation of how computers work (and should work) as opposed to typewriters.

Re:What's the point

[Anonymous Coward]

> To my knowledge, it's the first open-source word processor to have a MacOS X port.

No, a native KOffice port has been around for some time already. (Haven't used it though, I don't have a Mac...)

Re:What's the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Shame that KOffice is a bag of crap.

Re:What's the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask Microsoft to include unicows support and other core features into Win95. It's not really a problem of OpenOffice.org

Re:What's the point

[Anonymous Coward]

If I want to typeset something I'll use a typesetting system. Most of the time I just want to quickly create legible documents without having to worry about what arcane commands to use.

Besides, I've yet to see output from a system like Latex that I like. They might be nice from typesetting point of view, but the defaults are old fashioned and dated and it takes a lot of work to produce a modern looking document with it.

How can it be?

[teamhasnoi]

I thought word processors had to take up 3 CDs and had to have toolbars taking up half the screen.

I don't feel comfortable with this - it must be some sort of devilish sorcery!

Re:How can it be?

[bwoodring]

Are you trying to dig on Microsoft Office? 2003 for Windows comes on one CD, that's for the ENTIRE office suite: Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint, Infopath, Publisher etc. Additionally, Word ships by default with only one row of 16x16 toolbar icons showing. And if you're not talking about Office, what are you talking about?

Re:How can it be?

[mrchaotica]

I just tried Abiword for the first time, and it does have toolbars taking up half the screen! (I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm using a 12" iBook, but still...)

Re:How can it be?

[Senzei]

He's just caught in the slashdot timewarp where any reference to the quality of windows must by default compare at least five year old windows products with current linux counterparts.

AbiWord vs. OpenOffice?

[boarder8925]

I've used OpenOffice. How does AbiWord compare to it?

Re:AbiWord vs. OpenOffice?

[ClamChwdrMan]

It's pretty good. It definitely starts up faster than OpenOffice does, in both windows and linux. I would say that it doesn't always open .doc files perfectly though, especially if there is a lot of complicated things in the file. Other than that, both are great, but I tend to use OpenOffice more since I need to open .doc files all the time.

Re:AbiWord vs. OpenOffice?

[mindaktiviti]

Can we get Open Office and AbiWord supporting each other's formats?

Maybe this already happened but when I downloaded AbiWord 1-2 months ago it did not support OpenOffice.org.

Re:AbiWord vs. OpenOffice?

[tessdfield]

The OpenWriter format is only supported through a (rudimentary, at this point) import/export plugin. AbiWord will probably never use the OASIS format.

Re:AbiWord vs. OpenOffice?

[mscnln]

You can import an OpenOffice document in AbiWord 2.0, you just need to install the plugin.

Re:AbiWord vs. OpenOffice?

[Lehk228]

it should be hard wired, and both being open source apps they should have at least 95% accurate file excahnge very soon, and aim for 100% within a year. If the open source office app market is even remotely splintered MS can point at it and say it's a mess of incompatable formats rather than the single standardized* set of MS formats.

standardized from the FUD/marketspeak point of view, but still too easy a target. The major Open source apps absolutely need to have excellant cross app compatability when logical, so OpenOffice should be able to read and export to .xcf, gimp should be able to render .sxd files into a bitmap. Also apps need to be able to communicate with each other a bit such as loading up an instance of the gimp (or any other program) to work on an image embedded in an openoffice document sort of like the old OLE stuff that ms office used to use, except not launching apps inside each other, just send a signal to the gimp (or any other aware image editor) so that it would modify it's save dialog to have a "save back to source app" which would hand the finished product back automagically rather than saving to disk forcing the user to go delete the image from the original document and import the new version, it just "becomes" the image (but maintains the ability to "undo" reverting to the image as it was before it was saved back.

Re:AbiWord vs. OpenOffice?

[davidbix]

From my experience: OOo Writer: Better .doc file support as far as fonts & embedded graphics go. AbiWord: Starts much faster, better UI.

Re:AbiWord vs. OpenOffice?

[neumayr]

I've just compared soffice and Abiword for win32 on "War And Peace" from Project Gutenberg.

soffice takes about 50 Megs of memory, and free()s most of it when minimized. A nice feature, imo.

Abiword on the other hand takes about 164 Megs, and constantly burns a few cycles for whatever, I don't know what. It also doesn't free() memory when minimized. So, for that huge documents (~1300 pages) soffice seems to be a lot better, at least technically. AbiWords UI feels more intuitive though.

Re:AbiWord vs. OpenOffice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding me?

I only have 128MB of RAM, and I can run AbiWord. Not that I prefer one software to another, but I posted because I think your computer has a problem. No word preccessing software would use 164MB of memory.

I use OpenOffice more than AbiWord generally for my school work, because OpenOffice has better support for MS Word's document, which everybody else uses. I like OpenOffice's many feature, with which I don't need another office suite, but I like AbiWord's very user friendly, comfortable interface, and I hope the developers will keep making AbiWord better.

Oh and I salute to people who have the courage to start things from scratch. OpenOffice took the code from Sun's StarOffice. Its programming API and documentation are authoritative and dull, so I don't think it will last long because not many new and original ideas will come out of dull things, while AbiWord is innovative just like Gimp.

On the other hand, I don't really have to compare softwares so often if all they do is the same thing and are above some standards that suits my school work. I post mainly because your 164MB memory usage is nonsense.

Re:AbiWord vs. OpenOffice?

[neumayr]

Uhm, I think you misread or misinterpreted my post.

I tried both programs under unlikely circumstances, by making it hold a ~1300 pg file in memory.

Okay, I loaded it into soffice as a soffice file, and copypasted it into AbiWord. Maybe the conversion process took all that ram, but failed to free it. I don't think that's much better though.

Anyways, I did not want to belittle the effort and work the AbiWord team put into this program, sorry when it sounded like it.

Re:AbiWord vs. OpenOffice?

[cmbofh]

> AbiWord will probably never use the OASIS format.

That would be a shame. Here's a standardised open format that can already accomodate the needs of two office suites (OOo and KOffice (will be the native format in version 1.4)). If other suites were to join in then the format would gain even more acceptance.

Re:AbiWord vs. OpenOffice?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if it's really useful to compare two open source word processing applications just to do some bashing of one of them. Both are good applications and they have their user base. If you really want to start to compare them then it might be necessary to compare the differences of the 'office suites' behind them:

OpenOffice.org is based on a framework where all applications share code (most libaries used in OOo are shared libraries)

AFAIK AbiWord and Gnumeric don't share code

The OpenOffice.org project has been designed to be platform independend

I've never seen AbiWord or Gnumeric on Windows, Solaris Sparc, Solaris X86, OS/2 or other platforms != Linux

AFAIK AbiWord and Gnumeric don't share a common file format. OpenOffice.org has a common file format base

I don't really know if AbiWord or Gnumeric fulfil US governmental accessibility requirements. OpenOffice.org has accessibility support on most of it's platforms

Do AbiWord or Gnumeric have support for complex layout including the ability to have right to left input ?

Which font sets do AbiWord and Gnumeric support ? Do they allow the mixed usage of GB18030 characters within any locale, do they allow UTF-8 characters

Do AbiWord and Gnumeric have a common application programming interface ? Can both application interact together using a common programming interface ? Many companies need this kind of interoperability.

Can you program with these applications using different programming languages ? OpenOffice.org can.

It's up to you how to compare applications but it's not really useful if you don't have the insights into the features that these applications have.

I repeat: Both application suites have their user base but it's not really useful to compare applications which cannot be compared 1:1

Re:AbiWord vs. OpenOffice?

[mrchaotica]

It also opens WAY faster than OpenOffice on Mac OS if you take OO.o having to start X11 into account...

open source

[machiabelly]

It is also open source.

Bad font in Gnome screen shot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out...
http://www.abisource.com/screenshots/AbiWo rd-2.0-G nome.png

The kerning of the letters 'a','e' and 'r' is seriously too wide. It looks uneven and hard to read. If you are going to put Linux and Windows screen shots side by side, at least pick a nice font (and there are some good free ones) for the Linux screenie.

Re:Bad font in Gnome screen shot.

[tessdfield]

That screenshot is with 2.0 not 2.2, but yes kerning information isn't used yet.

Re:Bad font in Gnome screen shot.

[boarder8925]

Working LiNK for the lazy: http://www.abisource.com/screenshots/AbiWord-2.0-G nome.png

Re:Bad font in Gnome screen shot.

[afd8856]

thanks! I was too lazy to copy & paste & strip spaces you, sir, know what we ./ers need

Bartdosement

[monkeymonkey]

TechTV, MSNBC, Playboy...what's next? "Bart endorses Abi; kicks MS where it hurts"

Re:Bartdosement

[Infinityis]

Playboy endorses Abi? I should probably double check. Sounds like a good enough excuse for me to buy this month's issue...

Mac, Linux and Windows

[Tachys]

Finally, a word processor that works on Macintosh, Windows and Linux.

No Openoffice on Xfree86 does not count

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there is NeoOffice for the Mac, which is OpenOffice with a Java GUI.

Anonymous Cow

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[pcmanjon]

Someone in the community once told me that he figures the reason why they didnt port OO was because if someones stupid enough to pay for an OS they'd be stupid enough to buy their own word processor too (appleworks)

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[Reckless Visionary]

Then why is there OOo on Windows? Oh, because the "community" doesn't know what they're talking about.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[lederhosen]

not everyone that use windows, pays for it

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

No, just pcmanjon does not know what he's talking about.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[jeffehobbs]

I'd say everybody who uses Windows, pays for it, but maybe not with money...

~jeff

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the trolling community right?

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[BlackStar]

You might wish to look again. OpenOffice is native on Linux and Windows, and NeoOffice/J on Mac is actually fairly polished. Using some Java widgets and Mac bindings, about the only downside is a bit of a slower startup time, but there's no "Open X Windows, start OpenOffice, click on the file I just got in the email as a word Doc" BS anymore.

Worth a look. Works quite well.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[HeghmoH]

AppleWorks sucks and Office is tremendously expensive (almost 50% of the purchase price of a new eMac). OO could make a market-share killing on the Mac if they would get it ported for real.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[CPCA]

You should try neooffice/j [http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php]. It's based on OOo 1.1.2, and it integrates beautifully with OS X.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[adam mcmaster]

I agree completely - AppleWorks is exactly the same as Claris Works (which is a bad thing); it doesn't even use widgets that fit in with Aqua.

I prefer OpenOffice to AbiWord, but with a Cocoa port years away AbiWord will do just fine for my day-to-day word processing needs. If there was a port of Gnumeric, and some equivalent of OOImpress I'd be all set.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for sure didn't gave my sould to microsoft ;)

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[bsharitt]

Beautifully, except for looking like crap.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[holloway]

Why is it so dark then. Those aren't my windows desktop colours.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[Queer Boy]

Except it doesn't work for me. Dual 2 Ghz G5 running 10.3.6 and I get all kinds of cosmetic glitches (black patches all over) and I can't use it. Are there supposed to be menus? Because I don't have any.

I've never had any luck with ABiWord, so I'm not surprised. Maybe Apple could use this as the basis for the next AppleWorks, of course I think KOffice would be a better fit.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[tessdfield]

As far as I know, you're the first person to report this. Would you mind filing a report in bugzilla and maybe attaching some screenshots? It would aid development, especially if you could help debug the problem (mainly by commenting on/answering followup questions in bugzilla). Thanks.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[rice_burners_suck]

No Openoffice on Xfree86 does not count

Well, how about this instead: Run OpenOffice for Windows on Wine on Xfree on Linux on VMware on FreeBSD on Bochs on Windows on VirtualPC on Mac OS X.

If you don't have a Mac, run Mac OS X in PearPC on Linux on x86.

That will make the system quick and responsive.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[damiam]

Not everyone that uses OSX pays for it, either. But the vast majority of OSX and Windows users do pay for it, which was the point.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for sure didn't gave my sould to microsoft ;)

sould? What, is that like your soul server?

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[kannibal_klown]

The Education version of Office is $149 USD. It can be bought over the counter without any ID. It's also a great port, in my opinion. It's better than the Windows versions.

Granted, that's a lot more expenive than a free or Open Source application. But's it's a nice app.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[nova_ostrich]

Whoever modded this Informative is going to be in for a HUGE surprise.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[pongo000]

No Openoffice on Xfree86 does not count

Let's see...NeoOffice on my iBook and G4 PowerMac...OpenOffice under Windows...and my Linux box knows only XFree86, which seems to like OpenOffice just fine.

So what's your point?

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[nado]

I like AppleWorks. It does look a bit odd, but it came free with my machine, it's stable and gets the job done without any hassles. I heard the next version's gonna use the right GUI APIs.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[ThousandStars]

almost 50% of the purchase price of a new eMac

MSO might be tremendously expensive, but I imagine that most people either buy the "Student/Teacher" edition for $150, which is a considerably lower percentage of the cost of a new eMac, or pirate Word.

That isn't to say OO or Abiword aren't useful products, because they are; but I suspect plenty of people don't pay $500 for MSO.

On another note, does anyone know why the Abiword people aren't providing OS X binaries? That would make it easier for the non-technical to use the program.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[lederhosen]

Well, if you buy a "brand" computer you will pay
microsoft tax, however you can buy many computers
without windows. This is not true for Mac; if you buy a Mac you *will* pay for OSX. Even if you could
by a mac without OS (I doubt it) you would pay for
the OS anyway cause Apple has a Monopoly on the hardware and much of the "hardware cost" go to software development.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

If there were Mac OS/X developers then the NeoOffice/J fork wouldn't be necessary.
It's really interesting to see MAC users which comment on development related topics without being able to support open source developers to natively port such an application...

Steve Balmer brought it to the point: Developers, developers, developers ....

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[TheRaven64]

I used to have a copy of Office installed on my Mac (we have a site license), but deleted it to save space after not having used it for the month it had been installed other than to load it say `Hmm. This doesn't look to bad.' and close it again. I am occasionally required to give presentations, and find Keynote to be a joy to use. Going back to PowerPoint leaves me wanting to find the designers and nail their hands to the desk until they have sat through a few weeks of UI lectures. Word is a word processor. I still haven't worked out what niche a word processor is intended to fill. For small documents, TextEdit is usually sufficient (and my editor prefers things that small to be submitted as text files anyway). For large documents, I'd far rather use something that properly supports semantic markup and a proper text layout engine, such as LaTeX (the output from Word looks hideous in comparison).

A decent spreadsheet for the Mac would be nice, but on the rare occasions I need to use one OOo or AppleWorks is fine.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[damiam]

You can buy non-Apple PowerPC machines and run OSX using MOL, or run it in a PearPC-style emulator. You can also buy an older Mac that didn't come with OSX.

Also, even if you buy a Mac with OSX, you could still consider yourself to be not paying for the OS if you pirate the upgrades (which are effectively whole new OSs).

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

...maybe Apple want's to support the open source community by providing developers who'll help Apple to get out the jaws of MS$...

...and they could do even more for the open source community by resigning the patent for 'byte hinting'...

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[lederhosen]

yes, absolutely, in theory.

Re:Mac, Linux and Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

If anyone tried to mass-market a MOL/PearPC solution bundled with OS X, Apple would be on them like a ton of bricks. Not mention that it's completley unsupported hack that Apple might decide to break at any time.

UNLEASHED !!!!

[ThomasFlip]

yeah this is probably redundant and off topic, but what is with 'unleashing' software or books. It makes it sound like some ravenous carnivore is on the loose. I think its time to get over it and say something like 'released', or 'available'.

Re:UNLEASHED !!!!

[ScrewMaster]

How about "escaped" ... no, that's too much like what happened to Valve's Half Life 2 source.

Re:UNLEASHED !!!!

[khendron]

That's reserved for Klingon software.

"What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software escapes, leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake!"

From: here

Re:UNLEASHED !!!!

[ScrewMaster]

Yeah, that was a funny one all right. I liked the part about challenging the QC department to a Bat Leth contest ... "They will trouble us no longer."

Re:UNLEASHED !!!!

[SharpNose]

There was a series of geek books called "xxxxxx Unleashed." It reminded me of the movie "Heercules Unchained."

Default font for Abi Word?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the earlier comments mentioned problems with fonts. I don't have any problems. I just use the regular default font for AbiWord...
AbiNormal

Thank-you, thank-you, I'll be here all week...

I've heard it does UTF8

[Anonymous Coward]

So I'd love to use it on my old Vaio as OO is way too slow, but Abi installs files all over the place which is a problem in my case. I wish they could package it in a way where it was a bit more independent from the other directories. Firebird is a awesome in this respect.

Re:I've heard it does UTF8

[znu]

Try the Mac OS X version. It's a single self-contained application bundle; one icon, drag-and-drop install.

It still doesn't quite look like a fully native OS X app yet though. But it looks like they've replaced a lot of the dialogs with Cocoa versions already. If they keep that up, and they improve the icons a bit (many of them don't seem to be antialiased), they'll have a really nice OS X app in fairly short order.

Ant?

[nullchar]

How does AbiWord relate to an "Ant"?

Re:Ant?

[tessdfield]

The mascot for AbiWord is "Abi the ant."

Re:Ant?

[Phoinix]

You can unleashe and Ant(!) but not a word. No?

I have no idea what the "Abi' part stands for.

Re:Ant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Abi - Free (as in Libre)

Re:Ant?

[sisukapalli1]

The "Ant" in the summary refers to the "Ant" as in "Ant, the Abiword logo", and not as in "Ant, the Java based build tool".

S

Re:Ant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol! Lol! Oh lol!!!1

Re:Ant?

[JimLynch]

I liked Ant. What a drag that he's gone. :(

Re:Ant?

[PlaidRab]

There was a perception that less saavy foloks would equate her ( Abi the ant ) with bugs and from there to buggy software. So Abi only shows up on dev builds and such.

Word count and formulae

[UnxMully]

One thing that stopped me going to OpenOffice was the poor word count capabilities, i.e. only for the wholw document and not sections. As a mature student this is kind of a deal-breaker for me.

As is a formula editor. As a mature student studying sciences, a formula editor is pretty much mandatory.

Re:Word count and formulae

[Anonymous Coward]

>As is a formula editor. As a mature student studying sciences, a formula editor is pretty much mandatory.

OOo has a fantastic formula editor. I can hammer out an equation in no time, flat. Once you learn the markup it's desperately simple and extremely powerful.

Re:Word count and formulae

[tessdfield]

Word count in AbiWord can use the selection of text or the whole document. Formula editing is being worked on in the ABIMATH branch (using gtkmathview), but may not be ready for 2.4.

Re:Word count and formulae

[Anonymous Coward]

There aren't any wordprocessor that do a good job with formulas. If you are really concerned about this, then you need to learn LaTeX....

Re:Word count and formulae

[UnxMully]

That's good stuff. Unfortunately I've already shelled out the £120 for three copies of Office 2003 so won't be switching. I'll have a look when the formula stuff get's put in.

Re:Word count and formulae

[saldek]

I notice that a good spell-checker would come in handy too.

Re:Word count and formulae

[rco3]

LyX.

It's a LaTeX front-end, and more. It's a perfectly serviceable word-processor that uses LaTeX for rendering, and I first began using because of the equation editor.

Re:Word count and formulae

[bigberk]

As is a formula editor.

What are you talking about? Have you even tried the formula editor in OpenOffice.org? Just do Insert -> Object -> Formula. As an electrical engineering student, this this is one of the most beautiful equation editors I've seen (better than Word Perfect's which I used to use). You can type meaningful expressions like this,

C over R = G over {1 + G} = {%pi e^{0.1s}} over {1 + s over 10}

Re:Word count and formulae

[UnxMully]

I think the hint was the "As is..." bit. The bit that really put me off OpenOffice was the lack of ability to select a section of text and get the word count for that section. Word does this, OpenOffice doesn't. OpenOffice's equation editor is perfectly serviceable but without the word count it's a bit of a moot point. Clear enough?

Re:Word count and formulae

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah and it doesn't have a selection equation counter either. This is a big show stopper as well. Back to my selectric.

"Native" Mac version

[Anonymous Coward]

While the Mac version may be native, it doesn't feel like a Mac application.

Text drag & drop isn't integrated with the rest of the system, some of the text editing commands (like alt-forward-delete) just don't work, the buttons in the save-before-closing? dialog are in the wrong order and have the wrong titles, and there is just a subtle feeling of... alienness... over the entire GUI.

People who use AbiWord on other platforms should feel right at home but most Mac users will be turned off.

Re:"Native" Mac version

[tessdfield]

The Carbon port is very much still being worked on; it would be helpful if you filed these issues in BugZilla (some are already there).

Re:"Native" Mac version

[Anonymous Coward]

...some of the text editing commands (like alt-forward-delete) just don't work...

...because Macs don't have the "alt" key... :-D

Re:"Native" Mac version

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey guys,

I'm just one person, with occasional bits of help from others. I'm working on making AbiWord behave like a native app, but I must confess that although I have been using Macs for over four years I don't have a particularly exact view of how native apps are supposed to behave.

Anyway, the Cocoa port is very much a work in progress, and any suggestions / complaints should be filed in Abi's bugzilla.

Don't forget to check for latest development information at:
http://www.abisource.com/~fjf/

This is free software, feel free to jump in and fix what you don't like.

fjf

Re:"Native" Mac version

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever seen a modern Mac keyboard? The option key has been labeled "alt" since forever.

Re:"Native" Mac version

[tessdfield]

Er, by Carbon I meant Cocoa ;).

Re:"Native" Mac version

[thecombatwombat]

The Mac version isn't perfect, but it's only a few months old. I've used every beta release and development has been FAST. In the last month they added an Enchant back-end for the native spell checking, a major integration boost. I'm sure the issues you listed will start dropping fast, and hey, have to say it, especially things like dialog button order . . . easy to contribute yourself.

It's only about five months old, and a million times more integrated than openoffice via X11. I'm still massively thankful for the port, and can't wait to see it five more months from now.

Re:"Native" Mac version

[rich3rd]

I don't have a particularly exact view of how native [OS X] apps are supposed to behave.

Check out the HIG, for starters (also available as a PDF).
Cheers, and keep up the good work!

Re:"Native" Mac version

[Blakey Rat]

Yes... in the small font used for compatibility reasons. The same font that forward-delete is labelled as 'del' and that Clear is labelled as 'num-lock.'

Macs really do not have a alt key. The reason the label is there is because a USB keyboard can be used on any type of computer, and therefore it should have all the expected labels.

Re:"Native" Mac version

[KillerDeathRobot]

People who use AbiWord on other platforms should feel right at home but most Mac users will be turned off.

Unless of course they're coming from OpenOffice, in which case they'll be thrilled.

Re:"Native" Mac version

[TheRaven64]

On my PowerBook, the key between ctrl and command (the one with the Apple and the clover leaf thingy on it) is labelled alt. It also has the railway-points icon used to indicate the option key, but this is underneath the text saying alt, which is the same font and size as the label on the ctrl key.

Re:"Native" Mac version

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up

fjf is the current maintainer of the Abiword Macintosh port.

Ant?

[antdude]

AbiSource doesn't use its mascot, Ant, anymore. :(

LaTex?

[the_truk_stop]

I'm sure that a mature student such as yourself knows to use LaTeX for the advanced math formulas you're no-doubt creating. LaTeX is the only real answer for complicated math equations and such. Check out LaTeX: Math into LaTeX Short Course.

Moderate this comment
Negative: Offtopic Flamebait Troll Redundant
Positive: Insightful Interesting Informative Funny

Re:LaTex?

[UnxMully]

Fortunately the maths is still simple enough that the equation editor for Word is good enough. However, I've been getting frustrated with the word processing capabilities and some of the quirks of Word 2000 - some of the random style changes it seems to favour piss me of large - so unless 2003 is better I may end up switching anyway. Thanks for the link.

Keeping up appearances

[TimmyDee]

The Mac OS X port is certainly coming along nicely. Just the fact that it uses Aqua widgets is a Good Thing, but it still has a long way to go in the picky world of Mac users. I'm not saying they haven't put any effort into it (because they certainly have -- just look at the splash screen and the disk image background along with the general Aqua appearance). It's just that a lot of Mac users are really, really, really picky when it comes to how their apps look and behave. Hell, look at Firefox. It's come a long way with the look and feel, but there are still a ton of people who complain that the web page widgets aren't OS native.

Here's what I've noticed in AbiWord 2.2 so far. The buttons look very 10.0 and there is still some issues with ghosting or artifacting (whatever you want to call it) as you move the tabs across the rulers. The save dialog boxes aren't sheets. The formatting toolbar has some issues with dual monitors (it puts the styles menu on my secondary screen when the pull-down is close to the edge of the primary). Also, the toolbars must be treated as windows themselves, because clicking on the menu bar disables many of the menu options, making me think the document window isn't completely "active". On the positive, I'm glad there are live resizing windows and a good preferences interface. It's closer, but there's still a bit of polish to put on it before Mac users accept it with open arms.

Re:Keeping up appearances

[tessdfield]

The longer these issues are kept out of Bugzilla, the longer they persist (yes, that's a request for you to add them to Bugzilla ;))

Re:Keeping up appearances

[Blakey Rat]

Just FYI, I know that sheets are the "correct" way of showing dialogs, but I personally can't stand them. You can't move a sheet out of the way of the text below it... often I don't know what filename to give a saved file because there's a big sheet in the way that can't be moved. So I have to close the save sheet, then find the text I need, then choose save again. Pain in the ass.

Re:Keeping up appearances

[TheRaven64]

Also, the toolbars must be treated as windows themselves, because clicking on the menu bar disables many of the menu options, making me think the document window isn't completely "active".

On OS X (and in OpenStep), rather than there being a single active window, there is a key window and a main window. The key window is the window which accepts keystrokes, and the main window is the one containing the current document (the focus of the user's attention). Most of the time, the key window and the main window will be the same - the Safari window I am typing this post in is also one containing the current document (the parent post). Floating toolbars and pallets are the main exception - they can become key, but not main. If you have used an NSPanel for the toolbar, then then this is handled automatically. If not, then you can subclass NSWindow and override the - (BOOL)canBecomeMainWindow method to return NO (then just set your new subclass to be the window's class in Interface Builder).

Re:Keeping up appearances

[Anonymous Coward]

The longer these issues are kept out of Bugzilla, the longer they persist (yes, that's a request for you to add them to Bugzilla ;))

I cannot empahsize enough how important it is that you provide feedback and submit bug report. FJF, the maintainer of Abiword for the Mac has already asked for as much help as possible to make Abiword a properly intergrated Mac application so get involved and please help out in any way you can.

Office suite need not apply

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't we learned ANYTHING from the "jack of all trades, master of none" syndrome in other all-in-one office suites? Why can't we just have individual tools that work well and that don't involve huge resource footprints?

Personally, I would prefer to have a bulletproof word processor and bulletproof spreadsheet program. I don't really care if they talk to eachother or understand their respective formats. I suspect that the vast majority of users out there probably feel the same way.

Cheers,

Re:Office suite need not apply

[pherthyl]

I don't really care if they talk to eachother or understand their respective formats. I suspect that the vast majority of users out there probably feel the same way.

Wrong. Integration is absolutely essential for an Office suite. Every single document I create (mostly technical reports) have some sort of embedded graph or table.
Without that feature, the word processor is useless for me.

Re:Office suite need not apply

[say]

I suspect that the vast majority of users out there probably feel the same way.

Wrong. Integration is absolutely essential for an Office suite. Every single document I...

Hello? The "vast majority" does not at all times include "yourself". That's why it says the "vast majority", and not "all". You should really read up on basic language constructs.

Re:Office suite need not apply

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello? The "vast majority" does not at all times include "yourself".

But somehow, the "vast majority" always manages to include you. How does it feel like to be the World's Most Typical Computer User?

"Native" Mac OS X "port"

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs it? "Better support" for "international" "scripts" and "locales" is Windoze and Leenux jargon. Mac OS X users will only accept Unicode savvy apps. What is "international" anyway? Non-English?

Re:"Native" Mac OS X "port"

[808140]

That's not actually true. For one thing, the concept of a locale is pretty much a UNIX thing (it originated with Solaris IIRC), and they exist on Mac OS X as well (although I don't know if Quartz uses them). Windows normally has localized versions of its OS -- meaning that you buy Windows (Simplified Chinese version, Thai version, Japanese version, etc) and can't switch it up too much. I don't actually use Windows at all so this may be incorrect for modern NT-based versions (let me know if it is) but it used to be that way, at least.

At any rate, a "locale" has nothing to do with unicode. Locales essentially provide a way for the user to customize the operating environment for things like messages (what language the menus are in, for example), sorting order (what does "alphabetical order" mean in languages like Chinese?), date formats, currency symbols, what to use as a decimal point, what to use as a digit group seperator (is one thousand "1,000" or "1.000" or "1 000" or "1000"?), how many digits to group (10,000 or 1,0000?), etc. Unicode is only a character encoding. Pretty much any modern app that supports full localization is unicode internally, anyway, because it's a pain in the butt otherwise (emacs is a lamentable exception to this rule).

Abiword is unicode internally, anyway. glibc wchar_t is (on Linux, anyway) unicode internally, and converts legacy encodings (like iso8859-1, big5, gbk, etc) into unicode automatically. This is true on Mac OS X too, I think.

So yeah, "unicode" is just a way of mapping characters to numbers. It's only better because it has more characters than any other encoding I think (although there is some huge GB encoding that might be larger, but I can't remember what it's called).

Re:"Native" Mac OS X "port"

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows has been able to switch languages per-user since 2000. There are still country-specific versions, plus a "multi-language" UI pack (that might be included with XP now, I'm not sure). I won't get into details about what each one of those options actually does, you can look that up.

Also, "unicode" is not an encoding. You're thinking of UTF8, or UTF16, etc. Unicode is a character set (mapping) standard, very similar to (but not the same as) ISO-10646.

First impressions from a MacOS X User

[Llywelyn]

Before we begin, let me emphasize that I have no strong need for a word processor, using various LaTeX tools when I need something high level and professional, and only keep a word processor around for opening other people's documents and quick/small work. When I do use one, Mellel is generally my word processor of choice.

I don't use MS Word.

A word processor for me has to integrate pretty seamlessly with the operating system--it has to look and feel like a MacOS X application--so I focused on where AbiWord falls short of that mark in this review.

Using it on a 12" PowerBook:

* It initially takes up an enormous amount of screen real-estate, with the main window stretching down into my dock where I have to move the window to get to it.

* Korean input was a little funky compared to normal MacOS X entry. It showed up okay, but the intermediate steps don't display.

* The same appears to be true of all special character/multi-key entry (such as option-e e to generate an accented e). The end result shows up fine, but the intermediary display for what I am doing is nonexistent.

* The initial display of the tool palette is largely redundant with the tool bars.

* Slow when on a highish processor load. I type text and it hesitates a moment before displaying it. This is noticeably worse than the rest of the system under the same load.

* Some standard command keys do not work as they should (e.g., command-t). Others are just strange (command-. is "paste unformatted").

* Highlighting is strange, reversing the color of the highlighted text. It also feels slow and clunky.

* On the plus side, it now seems to use the system dictionary for spelling, which is a Good Thing&#153;.

* It doesn't support drag-and-drop from the desktop or to other apps.

* It doesn't always like pasting PDF clips copied out from other documents (namely TeXShop).

* Nonstandard save dialogue that gives options "No" [space] "Yes" and "Cancel" with the default going to "Cancel."

Solid, they've made a lot of improvement since I last used it (particularly on MacOS X), but it isn't there yet.

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[tessdfield]

Some of those issues are filed in bugzilla, but some aren't; it would be appreciated if you could add them there.

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[Queer Boy]

Nonstandard save dialogue that gives options "No" [space] "Yes" and "Cancel" with the default going to "Cancel."

This always makes me crazy. Buttons should be Verbs because they cause an action. A dialog should tell you what happened, why it happened, and what you can do. This is the way it should be.

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[fatphil]

Weird.
In response to "Do you want to replace it?", "Do you want to review the changes before quitting?", and "Do you want to save the changes before quitting?" I think that "Yes" and "No" are perfectly good answers. They aren't verbs, they're _answers_. To the _question_ the dialog box just asked. The clue is in that little squiggly symbol "?" at the end of the sentence.

What's _broken_ is when the question gives you two options, and the choices provided by the buttons don't 100% correspond to the options in the questions. Seen on lame Windows software many a time.

FP.

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[Queer Boy]

They aren't verbs, they're _answers_. To the _question_ the dialog box just asked. The clue is in that little squiggly symbol "?" at the end of the sentence.

Explain to me how this is better. You've explained why it's broken, now tell me why it's better.

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[fatphil]

What the fuck do your various "it"s refer to in your question? How fitting that in a sub-thread about how to most efficiently elicit a response you provide a question that's hideously garbled.

I think it's better to match the response to the request.
If the request from the system is an a question most simply
answered with a yes/no answer then the responses available should be yes and no.

How would you answer "Do you want a cup of tea?"
1) The verb [Drink]
2) The noun [Tea]
3) The answer [Yes]
If you do anything apart from (3), then i pity those who share a domicile with you, and doubt you ever get asked if you want a cup of tea.

FP.

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[Queer Boy]

The "it" quite clearly refers to the method of presenting information and the response action. Since the discussion was in reference to the two differing methods.

Play dumb all you want, it was quite obvious what my reference was. You also avoided the challenge completely. Fitting.

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[Anonymous Coward]

for a name like queer boy, it should be no surprise that I award you the asshat of the day award!
*hands the award over*

enjoy.

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[Quattro Vezina]

Play dumb all you want, it was quite obvious what my reference was. You also avoided the challenge completely. Fitting.

I'm sorry, but what the fuck are you talking about? Your posts, both of them, make absolutely no sense whatsoever, so I've come to the conclusion that you're either stupid or a troll. Probably both.

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[Spaseboy]

Are you new here? Oh, yeah.

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[fatphil]

"""
The "it" ...
"""

Oh dear, poor little Apple advocate can't count up to two, the number of "it"s in that sentence. Must be something to do with the mouse buttons.

Shit, I hate having to explain the nuances in insults, but you really are that thick.

And I went out of my way to try to guess what the hell your question was supposed to be and to educate you, basically by repeating my original point, slightly more s_l_o_w_l_y this time in the hope that something would sink in, but alas to no avail.

Glad to have you as a freak, I will be less likely to see your dross in the future.

FP.

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[arodland]

Exit Without Saving?
You're exiting, but Slashdot Post.txt is unsaved.

[Save] [Exit anyway] [Don't Exit]

See how the entire problem is eliminated by de-squigglifying? Suddenly the two things don't depend on each other, they relate to each other. Stock Yes/No/Cancel dialog boxes might have made sense for Windows 3.1, but they're not necessary today.

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[KillerDeathRobot]

How would you answer "Do you want a cup of tea?" 1) The verb [Drink] 2) The noun [Tea] 3) The answer [Yes] If you do anything apart from (3), then i pity those who share a domicile with you, and doubt you ever get asked if you want a cup of tea.

This isn't consistent with the OS X paradigm. It would go more like,

Do you want a cup of tea?
A cup of tea is available.

[Drink][Don't Drink] [Nevermind]

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[fatphil]

That's fine - but remove the yes/no-answerable question from the dialog. That's what I've been complaining about - the fact that the responses offered don't match the question asked.

"Necessity" is a complete irrelevance anyway, almost nothing is necessary.

FP.

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[schotter]

Mac OS X save dialogs and sheets don't usually have questions in them to start with -- that's part of what's wrong here.

Most look a bit like this:

Save as: [my slashdot post.txt]
Where: [Documents]
File Format: [Plain Text]
<Cancel> <Save>

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[fatphil]

In that case, I wouldn't usually have a problem with them.

However, the apple URL provided by the person I initially responded to was peppered with example dialog boxes that did have yes/no questions prominantly in them.

FP.

Re:First impressions from a MacOS X User

[Nevyn]

On abiword for GNOME I get...

Save changes to document blah before closing? Your changes will be lost if you don't save them. [Close without saving][Cancel][Save]

...I can just read the button titles and ignore the text.

buggy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm only interested in this if the text flicker issues have been fixed.

Re:buggy

[tessdfield]

Numerous instances of text flickering have been fixed, but it's still not perfect. I'd recommend checking it out though (there /is/ a noticeable difference in 2.0's performance in this area and 2.2's).

Re:I like Abiword and LyX-Aqua....

[Anonymous Coward]

For the same reason. In my experience, LyX-Aqua comes up much faster than a modern word processor has any business doing. On my powerbook, it displays the UI in three seconds.

My other document editor

[LordHatrus]

I'll be keeping emacs, thank you very much.

Ant?

[Electroly]

I can't be the only one who read this summary and thought "What does AbiWord have to do with the Java-based build tool?"

Right to Left?

[wooby]

I downloaded the Mac version and set "Application-level" text direction to Right to Left so I can write documents in Arabic.

I followed the steps in this document, but alas, no luck. Arabic text input works, and the text is aligned right, but the input direction is still left to right and the result is not satisfactory. Anyone else tried doing this and succeeded?

Re:Right to Left?

[tessdfield]

Known bug being actively worked on: Bug 7078

Re:Right to Left?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the shaping and bidi stuff does not work on the Mac, but we are working on it.

and it takes only 2 seconds to crash

[Anonymous Coward]

garbage

and a lot of open source programmers are really

[Anonymous Coward]

really really condescending.

Does it still randomly crash?

[Anonymous Coward]

I made the mistake of installing it on my brothers computer.. so many times i hear him scream because it closed by itself without saving his homework project. I just tell him to save after every sentence.. sure i could install OpenOffice but im lazy.. but does it still randomy crash? ive tried several versions on different pcs and they all love to exit while you're typing.

Obligatory Monty Python quote...

[Infinityis]

Follow. But! Follow only if ye be programmers of valour, for the entrance to this cave is guarded by a program so foul, so cruel that no developer yet has compiled it and lived! Bones of full fifty men lie strewn about its lair. So, brave programmers, if you do doubt your courage or your strength, come no further, for death awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth.

Try making columns with it

[smartsaga]

its not bad but can't make columns out of selcted text only. It makes the whole document columns!!!

I'll stick with OOo for a while.

Re:Try making columns with it

[tessdfield]

That request is in bugzilla, but you can still accomplish that functionality with continuous sections breaks before and after the text in columns.

mnb Re:LaTex?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those "random style changes" you speak of are 99% of the time a result of default settings.

You can change them.

Office 2k3 will not be any better if you are talking about what I think you are.

Reply with more details if you want help.

Re:mnb Re:LaTex?

[UnxMully]

It's dumb things like entering typing "1. this is a bullet" which normally gets you a numbered list when you hit enter after bullet but sometimes you end up with the 1. bullet item and a level 1 header 2.0. Where you've changed your Normal style to use Arial but Word insists on changing back to it's beloved Times New Roman for no discernible reason. Where Bulletted lists end up with random indentations and tabs that don't align anywhere. I could go on forever. I used to us DEC Runoff to format documents, before Word even existed, and had none of these problems.

Re:mnb Re:LaTex?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was wrong.

You are not having the problems that 99% of users have re:Word and formating.

Not looking over your shoulder as you work, I'm guessing that the bullet lists issue has to do with the "tabs and backspace set left indent" option under Tools:Options:Edit.

On styles "reverting" I've see that too. I've even seen documents with 3 different "normal" styles defined - all of them labeled "normal" in the drop-down. Modifying an existing template always seems to lead to problems. It's better to create .dot s from scratch.

Re:mnb Re:LaTex?

[UnxMully]

No worries. That's in a document at work where I'm paid to put up with that annoyance so apart from it being annoying... Well you get my drift. The study stuff is different and I've installed a Tex implementation since this thread started. Problem is I can't find anything that tells me the available fonts. So while the power may be all I need when I get to do some real formulae, the stuff I'm doing at the moment works fine in the Word formula editor. To be honest, if it gets that hairy for my assessments I'll use word for the text and write the formulae by hand. A lot simpler than either Latex or Word. Word count's still bloody useful though.

Re:mnb Re:LaTex?

[TheRaven64]

You shouldn't be thinking about fonts while you are using LaTeX. The entire point is that it is a semantic markup language - you type what you mean, and it does the formatting for you. Having said that, there are a number of packages that can be included to change the default fonts, and you can also specify fonts with certain tags (you'll have to look them up - I never use them).

A good resource is the Not So Short LaTeX Tutorial. Additional packages are available from ctan.org. If you are writing anything that requires code listings, take a look at the listings package - among other things, it lets you add an entire source file complete with syntax highlighting and line numbering (completely configurable) with a single command.

If you've got a Mac, you should take a look at the Equation Service, which lets you type in LaTeX formulae and have them typeset to PDFs that you can then drag into other documents.

The way I understand it

[mnmn]

... is that OO is a complete suit, but the word processor part isnt as MSWord compliant as Abiword. Abiword is more MSWord compatible, and is standalone. They both startup slow and take more memory than good quality opensource software should.

When OO was new, I thought it was the Abiword killer.

I also dont quite get why Abiword isnt packaged as a part of OO. License incompatibility?

Lastly, I'm waiting for the firefox of word processors, something sleek and lean, fast, stable, with only the functionality I need, yet compliant with MS Word 2000. I've only needed Word and Excel, and these two applications need not be in the same office suite; only fast and compliant.

Re:The way I understand it

[mccalli]

They both startup slow

Platform-dependant. Starts quickly on my Mac here (867Mhz G4 Powerbook), whereas OpenOffice and NeoOffice take an age.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:The way I understand it

[mscnln]

I'm waiting for the firefox of word processors, something sleek and lean, fast, stable, with only the functionality I need, yet compliant with MS Word 2000.

Why wasn't the parent modded Funny? Really... abiword is all that!

Re:The way I understand it

[MrHanky]

... is that OO is a complete suit, but the word processor part isnt as MSWord compliant as Abiword.

Perhaps that is the case for AbiWord 2.2, but not for earlier versions. AbiWord 2.0 fails for very simple Word documents, but I haven't had many problems with OOWriter, except for a very graphical 'poem' that was totally dependent on font and font size (and line breaks).

But as OO and Abi have different release schedules, you can expect one to surpass the other at various points in time, just like IE once was very much better than Mozilla, etc.

Re:The way I understand it

[Anonymous Coward]

>I'm waiting for the firefox of word processors,
>something sleek and lean, fast, stable, with only
>the functionality I need,

it's called Emacs.

What ant?

[Anonymous Coward]

What ant are you talking about? Obviously not Ant, right?

Re:and it takes only 2 seconds to crash

[tessdfield]

How about some more information than that? If crashes go unreported, how are they supposed to be fixed?

Well, it LOOKS nice.

[rueger]

Oh, I so wanted to like this. It seems simple and elegant. Sadly though a simple document, created in OpenOffice, saved as MS Word, which opens just dandy in both, is trashed horribly by AbiWord.

Simple means: 1 logo graphic, one horizontal rule, text and a bulleted list.

Beyond that, why oh why oh why does every word processor default to changing e-mail addresses to clickable links? If my document is formatted in black 12 pt Arial I do NOT want anything on my page changed into blue underlined Times New Roman.

Am I alone in believing that a document intended to be printed on paper is different from a web page?

Oh yeah - and it's slow as molasses.

Re:Well, it LOOKS nice.

[Anne Honime]

Beyond that, why oh why oh why does every word processor default to changing e-mail addresses to clickable links? If my document is formatted in black 12 pt Arial I do NOT want anything on my page changed into blue underlined Times New Roman. If I had mod points, I'd have given you all of them. Just to add my little grain of salt : I haven't tried the new version yet, but all the previous releases I looked at missed one absolutely crucial feature : they just couldn't create footnotes. When you're in the humanities, that's an absolute NO GOOD.

Re:Well, it LOOKS nice.

[tessdfield]

AbiWord supports footnotes (and has since 2.0).

Re:Well, it LOOKS nice.

[Coryoth]

Am I alone in believing that a document intended to be printed on paper is different from a web page?

Nope. Get a Text Processor instead of a Word Processor and all will be well - you can define your output type when you run it on your source file.

Good Text Processor's include: TeX (and family eg. LaTex), and groff/nroff. If you want to produce good looking printed material, both are excellent. Beware the learning curve though.

Jedidiah.

Re:Well, it LOOKS nice.

[arodland]

LyX flattens the learning curve for LaTeX enough that normal people have a chance of getting it before they trip :)

Re:Well, it LOOKS nice.

[Kadmium]

Arial? For print? Why use a sans serif font if it's going to be printed?

Re:Well, it LOOKS nice.

[tooth]

I really like LyX. I don't use it now, but it helped me to get started down the LaTeX road. I didn't look at the source that much, but once I understood how a document should look, and how great they looked when printed it motorvated me to really hook in and learn how it's done. The final nail in the coffin was when my boss said, 'wow, that looks great' to a pretty basic document with a ToC.

I'm not saying that I'm that great at LaTeX, but I can do enough to make some pretty decent documents. Anything now-days that is just for me I'll use LaTeX, and anything that is the group I'm forced to use word.

As an aside, a funny story about OOo, I used it to make a pdf document of a .doc file. One of the Nazis in charge of licences comes over and goes 'Your not supposed to have pdf writer' or whatever it is... I just smiled and said 'I don't, it's OOo' ;-)

Re:Well, it LOOKS nice.

[stor]

So you're saying "You can disable that feature by using TeX"?

That's like disabling website popups by using lynx.

Cheers
Stor

Re:Well, it LOOKS nice.

[Coryoth]

So you're saying "You can disable that feature by using TeX"?

I wasn't talking about the minor niggle of email addresses being converted into links, I was talking about the fundamental philosophical issue what the program is designed to produce: High quality print, something for the web, or a half assed "either or". If you want something that specialises in high quality print output then LaTeX or groff are good choices.

That's like disabling website popups by using lynx.

No, that's like answering someone who is complaining about IPhoto plus as a tool for print design that they really ought to check out photoshop. TeX and groff are proffesional quality typesetting programs, Word is not. Word is fine if you want to dash of a letter, or don't care about your output, and it's simple to use. If you want to produce real quality print work then you need something like TeX, groff, or Framemaker. Trying to pretend that Word is great for print work is like trying to pretend that GIMP is great for print work: they're both very good tools, but print is not a job they do at all well in comparison to the competition.

Jedidiah.

Re:Well, it LOOKS nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

ROTFL

When they say "Unleashed"

[xant]

They mean the software is likely to maim or kill you if you get too close.

A couple of questions about Windows ports

[Qwavel]

Does the Windows port now support text folding?
Last time I tried this feature it wasn't working on Windows.

Also, what is the status of Gnumeric on Windows?

Thanks to everybody who contributed to these products. I think they are excellent.

Re:A couple of questions about Windows ports

[tessdfield]

Unfortunately, the text folding portion of the Bullets and Numbering dialog hasn't been worked on for the win32 port. As for Gnumeric, there's an RC1 available from here. I'm not sure how far along it is though.

Software Listings

[CharonIDRONES]

Is anyone else noticing Slashdot turning more and more into FreshMeat everyday?

Its all well and good with this software and what not, but this is just getting out of hand. News for Nerds, yeh, but there is a reason why we have places like FreshMeat :P

-Brandon

Re:Software Listings

[ubernostrum]

Three years ago called. They want their whining back.

Page Number Suppression

[NullPhi]

I just downloaded and played with this; however, I am wondering if there is any way to suppress the page number on page one of a document. Without support for this I am still chained to MS Word.

Re:Page Number Suppression

[tessdfield]

Sure, Format > Header/Footers and choose 'Different header on first page' :).

Re:Page Number Suppression

[NullPhi]

I feel stupid. Thanks! I never thought I would say anything like that...

abi is great ... but

[bikerguy99]

(just like every other WP) is still missing one key feature - a built-in robust reference manager. OpenOffice has one but it functions like a stone-age app and is of no use due to lack of direct linking with on-line databases. This leaves EndNote as porbably the only reference manager out there and it works best with MS Word and somewhat less with Nisus. I have bugging developers to include this feature/functionality into any of their WP's but to no avail - does anybody know why? Overall, Abi and any other recent WP efforts along same lines are missing the boat with research-oriented users. Finally, Abi still cannot open MS Word docs with even minor traces of sophisticated formatting - but that may be due to inherent qualities of MS Word.

Re:abi is great ... but

[scrub76]

If you're on OSX, you may want to check out the combination of Mellel and Bookends. Mellel really is a nice replacement for MS Word, though it doesn't support some features like 'track changes' that are helpful in a collaborative setting.

Bookends (http://www.sonnysoftware.com/) integrates with both Mellel and MS Word, and they don't even force a paid upgrade for compatibility with new versions of Word (damn Endnote). The mechanism for adding refs to Mellel and Word docs from Bookends is similar to Endnote -- the only real problem with Bookends is that is uses an overly large, non-customizable (I think) display for the main reference window.

Also, the related Reference Miner app is terrific for extracting references from databases like Pubmed. Much, much faster than connecting to databases from within Endnote.

No affiliation with these products, except as a long-suffering Endnote / Word user who stumbled onto these excellent alternatives earlier this year.

Re:abi is great ... but

[bikerguy99]

yes, I looked at bookends before but somehow was not impressed with reference miner... Maybe I should take another stab at it.

Re:I like Abiword and LyX-Aqua....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but look at the lyx interface. Something like conglomerate is much nicer to deal with.

Bug fixes

[bvankuik]

Attention, everyone. This guy logged a bug and it got actually fixed in the next version. That's a lot better than OOo's trackrecord (I've logged a bug which is heading towards two years and not fixed). This really says something about the development team, enthousiastic and not bogged down by crazy procedures.

Re:Bug fixes

[n4t3]

This much is true. The response from the team was immediate. I had downloaded a release from the site, found an issue with text selection highlighting not working as expected and reported it that night through their Bugzilla reporting system. Turns out they had fixed the issue in 2.1.99 but it wasn't available on the site for download for OSX so they sent me a link to 2.2.0 which did indeed fix that issue for me. So to be fair, they had already identified and corrected the issue I logged before I logged it. Still, Abiword rocks all over running OO in X Windows on my iBook (the bloat!), looks good, runs fast and shows real promise. I'm not a big fan of office "suites", I just need a decent word processor and a spreadsheet as easy to use as Excel. As a confirmed anti-MS person, I have to admit that Excel is a damn good product.

Re:Bug fixes

[JeffTL]

The difference is that AbiWord is truly a non-profit effort -- the purpose is to produce a nice word processor, not provide a base for StarOffice.

Re:Bug fixes

[bvankuik]

Good points. While you'd think that a little money would make sure bugs got fixed, that is far from the truth. The Sun engineer made a quick fix and MONTHS later, QA finds it... This wouldn't happen with a developer who's doing it for the love of the labour.

Re:Bug fixes

[RedBear]

Keep an eye on NeoOffice/J, it's a separate build of OpenOffice.org that's being ported to use the native Mac OS X interface (Aqua) so it doesn't require X11. Kind of a stopgap measure while we all wait for OOo 2.0. They seem to be coming along pretty fast. It's still under heavy development but some folks are already using it on a daily basis. For those who can't afford MS Office for the Mac it's already a halfway decent alternative. It's huge, of course, but will probably behave better on the type of Word documents that you have been having trouble with in AbiWord. Might be worth a look.

"Unleashed"-Chucky.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It could be worse. It could have escaped leaving a bloody trail of dead programmers and users."

The program with killer sequals.

Grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh... still no grammar check from what I can see.

Re:Grammar

[tessdfield]

Nope, not yet.

Re:Grammar

[VAXGeek]

We don't even be needing a grammar check anyway.

BitTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could someone seed this? Using bittorrent instead of a costly HTTP download would be the least I could do to support them.

Also, I wonder what these links are. For Fedora Core download, below it it says:

Get Import/Export Plugins
Get Tools Plugins
Get ClipArt

For the OS X download, it says:

Get source code

For Microsoft Windows:

Get Import/Export Plugins
Get Tools Plugins

Why the differenence?

Re:BitTorrent?

[tessdfield]

The differences mainly stem from the way the packaging is done. The Windows executable automatically comes bundled with clipart and one plugin, while other packages are handled differently (hence the separate fedora core links).

MSOffice

[MHobbit]

I'll have to say MSOffice Professional 2003 is the way to go...

Re:MSOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

yep it craps on all the open source 'alternatives'

Re:MSOffice

[koreaman]

What were the mods smoking when they modded this troll?

Spellcheck

[Anonymous Coward]

please fix the spellcheck to accept "ise" endings (like in the word "realise") for the spellchecker for the New Zealand region. ISE is used exclusively here, and nobody writes IZE. Going through a whole document with that spellchecker is therefore hopeless :)

Re:Spellcheck

[tessdfield]

AbiWord relies on *spell (aspell, ispell, etc.) libraries for spellchecking rather than handling it "natively."

Re:Spellcheck

[Anonymous Coward]

so..?

Re:Spellcheck

[tessdfield]

It means it may be an issue with the spellchecking library and not AbiWord (it depends on which one you're using).

OS X beta

[zpok]

Very nice indeed, but imo it should be made clear - before you download - that the OS X version is beta, with some awkward known and unknown bugs.

Disclaimer: this remark because AbiWord is obviously targeted to non-power users...

ps: and with KDE/mac lurking around the corner, what exciting times!

Re:OS X beta

[tessdfield]

I think the readme says it's a "preview release," but yes the Cocoa port definitely has bugs (however development has been quite fast, with many previously reported issues having been squashed already).

Re:OS X beta

[zpok]

Yes, the read me does say that. I'm one of those rare people who actually read them ;)

And yes, regardless, nice app, nice to port it. I'm sure it'll be a hit.

but if there are known problems, why not release the OS X version say two weeks later? Just asking...

Cheers!

Use LyX

[Anonymous Coward]

LyX is a fantastic graphical word processor based on LaTeX. It's obviously outstanding for technical documents with lots of equations and you never have to touch actual LaTeX code if you don't want to.

http://www.lyx.org

Native versions are available for Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac OS X.

My experiences with this program

[mi]

As many, I am forced to consider the compatibility of my documents with Microsoft's Word.

Already a KDE user, I'd rather use KWord than install the whole GTK stack for this application. But KWord does not save in MSWord's format and the RTF it creates is wanting -- certainly so with respect to page headers/footers.

Curiously, AbiWord does not save in MSWord's format either. Oh, it pretends to so, and the file is named .doc, but if you compare it to the .rtf version, you'll discover, that the file name extension is the only difference.

Which is just fine, because MS Word seems happy with such files, whereas opening an .rtf file on Windows is "difficult" to certain "lusers", because MS Word does not register itself as the "opener" of such files. I don't know neither why, nor when did it stop doing so...

A feature I can't (yet?) find in AbiWord is creating custom fields (variables) that are automatically updated throughout the document, whenever changed in one place. I can easily refer to various data thought about by the software authors (document's title, page number, current date, &c), but can't find, how to create my own such fields. Can someone help? Maybe, this new 2.2 version will have it?

Re:My experiences with this program

[tessdfield]

Unfortunately, 2.2 doesn't have such a feature, however it has been requested (Bug 7342). Also, .doc exporting is exactly as you've described, .rtf with a .doc extension.

Re:My experiences with this program

[mi]

Unfortunately, 2.2 doesn't have such a feature, however it has been requested ( Bug 7342).

Thanks for the pointer! I just added this bug some votes.

Re:My experiences with this program

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Office does register itself as the default application for .rtf documents.

long documents

[Anonymous Coward]

I work with long documents (300-500pp) and just loading it into Abiword convinced me to go back to OpenOffice. My God, how...long...must...it...take...to...paginate? Abiword, the William Shatner wordprocessor.

Japanese

[Anonymous Coward]

Japanese input still doesn't work. I'd love to use this software, but it has to allow native input and formatting of Japanese. OpenOffice does, but its table support is crap. So I'm stuck with Word still.

Re:Japanese

[Anonymous Coward]

have you tried one of the current development snapshots ?

Re:Picky Mac users

[Bastian]

I think the pickiness of Mac users has a lot to do with the environment. I use both Mac OS X and Linux ab out equally often. On the Mac, I find that I get incredibly annoyed with bad user interfaces, whereas I barely even notice it in Linux.

It's really not about Mac users. It's that on the Mac there's so much uniformity in how applications look and behave (admittedly much more so on OS 9 than OS X) that your brain gets into a rut and really expects everything to work that way. Suddenly going from this to a Unixy app is like having the orientation of the ground you're standing on shift without warning - it's not going to be an entirely pleasant experience.

Compare this to a straight Unix environment, using all sorts of X apps. Every single app (more or less) behaves a little differently, uses slightly different widgets, uses different keyboard commands, and all that. It's like being on a boat - when the surface you're standing on tilts to the side, it's no problem because it's constantly swaying back and forth, and you expect it.

This is probably the core of why I have a Linux install separate from OS X. When I'm booted into Linux, I love old stand-by apps like the GIMP and OO.org. But an hour later I might be booted into OS X and running a Fink install on them and find them to be the most baneful travesties imaginable.

They can't copy ingenuity

[lonb]

It is great to see people working on such complex software as office suites, the most used of all applications. While I haven't tried the AbiWord product, I have tried MANY others from open source to freeware to commercial products.

While some are able to copy a subset of features of the Microsoft's Word product, none have come close to it, let alone achieving any groundbreaking functionality. This highlights the problem with open source movements. Microsoft has spent millions of dollars figuring out how to make a product that is easy for lots of people to use, partially due to consistency in it's design, usage, and general business logic. Open source struggles to match a directed approach to design and paid research.

While it bothers me that Microsoft has achieved it's substantial leadership through clearly monopolistic tactics, I give them credit for developing some phenomanlly usable products like MS Word and Excel (Excel has to be the most powerful office appliaction in existence).

To continue my thought... and upon saying what I have, note that there is PLENTY of room for improvement. I don't see any need to switch away from the globablly dominant office products just to save a bit of cash (that's pennywise). What would make the switch worth considering is a vast improvement in usability, stability, efficiency, security, etc. Where are those advances?

I've left some obvious holes here, but they are easily answered. For example, I realize many of the projects are just getting going and they need a base of code. However, it is really not newsworthy until there is something remarkable.

Re:They can't copy ingenuity

[Anonymous Coward]

You may be interested in my experience as a person who never used much neither MS Word nor any alternatives. And recently I suddenly needed to do a relatively complex template in Word, with frames, running heads etc.

My, did it SUCK big time.

I never seen such a counterintuitive, capricious, plain stupid app. Almost every time when I thought I finally "got it" and it will be easy from there, Word has some new surprise for me. Things constantly shuffle around. Some keys (as simple as End or Home) don't work everywhere. Snapping is atrocious and cannot be disabled. Accessing a single style requires literally dozens of clicks through many dialogs, and the effects are often unpredictable. That is MS Word.

So, don't tell me about the "usability" of this program. It's a myth. It's simply that millions of people have sucessfully wrapped their poor brains around this piece of junk and "came to know" its quirks.

And, guess what, the "usability" itself is also a myth. Very few people care about it. "General populace" certainly does not care about it. What people care about is that program gives them at least some way to get from A to B. They don't care if this way is ugly, stupid, long, inconvenient. If they learned it and have used it thousands of times, they are totally happy with it. They don't want anything else. They claim this is the best and most "intuitive" way to get from A to B! What an irony.

So, let's not speak about "usability" here. It's just that MS Word is imprinted too deeply into the brains of too many people, that is all.

Re:They can't copy ingenuity

[lonb]

You are wrong about the features. In any software, even the most intuitive, not understanding how it works will lead to problems. As an example, "snapping" is disabled by holding down the alt key. And it is true that the tables, if not used properly, can caused things to shuffle around -- but that is because it is automatically adjusting margins for you. Keep in mind that Word is not a layout tool such as Adobe PageMaker or an HTML editor such as MS FrontPage.

Further, while the common user doesn't actively think about usability they will simply give up earlier on difficult software. The act being more powerful than the thought (we might have as a geeks).

Re:They can't copy ingenuity

[gnugnugnu]

Microsoft "innovated" so many of the features of Word from WordPerfect it is not even funny.
Microsoft have hardly innovated anything at all unless you count Microsoft Bob and Clippy.
You really should check out the Microsoft Hall of Innovation

OpenOffice killed my AbiWord

[Nice2Cats]

I used AbiWord for a while, and then threw it out when OpenOffice reached 1.1.0: As nice and small as it is, OOo just lets you do more. I think that attitute might change if AbiWord moved to the common file format that OOo and Kword use by default.

I wonder just how hard AbiWord will get hit when OOo 2.0 comes out this year. You know, an OOo that doesn't take half of the morning to start up...

parent is not offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

The submission specifically mentions "ant", but doesn't clarify. It's a valid question, I wondered the same thing myself. Mods, please correct this abuse.

Re:Here's the point...

[symbolic]

First, there are many ways to implement the same functionality. Some code is better than other code. Some apps are better at some things than others. There is no one magic bullet, and I hope it stays that way. Why? When you start to settle on one platform, on one way of doing things, the creative waters that were once a rushing river, dwindle to a stagnant puddle. Cancerous dynamics start to intrude on the process, and soon you've got a mess that no one will touch. Where does that leave you?

(Look at the government to see how this works).

Kudos to the Abiword developers. :)

well

[Trepidity]

Just about everyone under 30 in Greece understands English pretty well...

11 millionths post

[machiabelly]

Hey, congrats on getting post #11000000 it only seems like yesterday that we had the 10 millionths

Put License Nazis in their place :)

[timothy]

Send your local branch a copy of PDF Creator (found on TheOpenCD, and on the Live CD version of Ubuntu -- just run the disk under Windows rather than booting up from it).

If they're jerks, tell them you'll sic the FSF on them.

timothy

This Looks Good

[The Lost Supertone]

Hey I'm so glad I found this App. I tried it before when they had that weird Ant thing going on on the icon.. this looks much better, feels better and isn't crashing it seems. I think I'm going to try and take notes in this and even write a ten page paper.

Portable Abiword?

[XNormal]

The adjacent story about Portable Firefox and Thunderbird makes me think that a portable AbiWord could be useful, too. If you carry your documents around on a USB flash disk it would make a lot of sense to take along the word processor capable of editing them and not require it to be installed on the target machine.

Decent post pipped glory-seeker to the post. Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Best thing is, *this* guy didn't get it, which is probably why he was pissed off.

Nice one!

Startup times

[cbr2702]

I am perfectly fine with long startup times: I have the programs I use the most start with my box. What matters to me is how snappy the program is when loaded, and whether it uses more and more resources as time goes on.

Huh.

[ubernostrum]

I didn't even notice that until you replied. In recognition, I'd like to thank the 10,999,999 people who helped me accomplish this stupendous feat; I couldn't have done it without you.

Poor, poor AppleWorks...

[Millennium]

It's really a shame about that program. It used to be the best office suite around for the price, and better than many of the more expensive ones.

Then, Apple bought it. This is not to say that Apple made it bad; rather, it's to say that Apple didn't do anything with it. They put in quite literally the bare minimum of effort to port it to OSX, and have done basically nothing with it since then. The port itself was so bad that it has permanently sullied the reputation of the Carbon API. There is still a faction of OSX users who won't use Carbon apps because of how bad the AppleWorks port was, three years after that port's release.

I guess it shows how important first impressions are. The first Carbon port was also the orignal Bad Carbon Port, and so to this day there are people who insist on only using Cocoa. Carbon got a bad rap because of Apple's lackluster effort in its first ports.

[nt] cause serif sucks?

[Anonymous Coward]