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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."
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.
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.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
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 ;))
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.