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

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

What's the point

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Mac, Linux and Windows

[Tachys]

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

No Openoffice on Xfree86 does not count

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: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.

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.

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: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: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.

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...

11 millionths post

[machiabelly]

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