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AbiWord 2.2 Unleashed

Posted by michael on from the wordperfect-support-still-sucks dept.

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."

5 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. Does a standalone WP have a use now? by ShatteredDream · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

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    1. Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now? by bcrowell · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

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  2. Mac, Linux and Windows by Tachys · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    No Openoffice on Xfree86 does not count

  3. Re:Bug fixes by n4t3 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. 11 millionths post by machiabelly · · Score: 3, Interesting

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