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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."
If you are non-english person - how's Abiword working for you?
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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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.
AbiSource will integrate AbiWord with other GNOME Office apps instead of creating a new spreadsheet (Gnumeric), presentation (Criawips), or database (GNOME-DB) component.
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...
Open Source Sushi
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.
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 ;))
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™.
* 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.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
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.
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.
I don't reply to ACs
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.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
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.
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