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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 for no other reason than it doesn't take five minutes to start up.
Tenemus pyrobolos atqui jacimus cognitiones.
If you are non-english person - how's Abiword working for you?
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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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.
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?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
now that we have OpenOffice?
Also, aren't word processors kind of backwards compared to typesetting systems?
I don't feel comfortable with this - it must be some sort of devilish sorcery!
Finally, a word processor that works on Macintosh, Windows and Linux.
No Openoffice on Xfree86 does not count
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.
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...
How does AbiWord relate to an "Ant"?
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.
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.
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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.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
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
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.
... 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.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
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.
Three Squirrels
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!
Is anyone else noticing Slashdot turning more and more into FreshMeat everyday?
:P
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
-Brandon
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.
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.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
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.
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.
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
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...
Hey, congrats on getting post #11000000 it only seems like yesterday that we had the 10 millionths