Slashdot Mirror
AbiWord 0.7 release
thomasd writes "AbiSource have just released development version 0.7 of their GPLed wordprocessor, which runs on Unix, Windows, and BeOS. There's still a fair bit missing, but it's now quite usable for producing simple document, and it's starting to look very polished. For the lazy, there are now binary packages as well as source code. "
I tried the new binaries last night, but then removed them.
Yes, it is coming along and works well. But at this point it doesn't do much that Netscape Composer doesn't do except rtf.
I'm sorry to say that I've started using Composer as my Linux Word Processor, but on the other hand the new Communicator 4.6 seems to be a dramatic improvement over 4.51. Can't put my finger on why but there seems to be much better speed, stability, etc. Maybe for VERY large files Composer will be too slow and a dedicated word processor will be needed.
What's the point in yet another word processing file format when one can save in plain old html which is readable by anyone with a browser. (Unless one is doing professional publishing on paper, and then use Tex). These deys most of what we write is kept in digital format and never gets to a sheet of paper. I do wish Abi saved directly in XML instead of its own format.
I hope that Abi will mature with a little time and allow such things as multiple windows (using tabs or whatever), inedxing, table of contents, etc. What they have done so far is very good, however.
Maybe we will finally have a native Linux word processor which is fast, fairly small, and has a modern look and feel. Keep up the good work!
I'm talking about a designer using his eye for colors, font, and positioning. Someone who has to have immediate feedback.
Just my own two cents, of course, but it sounds like you're describing an Adobe product here.
At a service bureau I worked at, we charged people a minimum of one hour design time to try to squeeze separations out of Word, and two hours for Publisher.
Maybe you can afford the $?,??? to buy NT server and SQL server and run Quake2 on your server (hahaha), but that doesn't mean you got a license to troll.
It gives me a license to tell the TRUTH. I'm running on a P166, a machine which you can buy for $300 now. What the hell are you using, a Timex Sinclair?
If you really understand what's going on under the hood in Win/Office 2000, you really won't want to talk about it.
Empty talk. Why don't you tell me "what's really going on." I've LOVE to see your answer.
Frankly, I don't believe you have a clue.
LizardKing> Personally I hope that if AbiWord does
LizardKing> start to have more esoteric features,
LizardKing> that the developers come up with a
LizardKing> simple plugin module that makes all
LizardKing> such addons optional.
The even cooler thing is that such a plugin structure would allow non-Abisource folks to write their own plugins and distribute them on, say, freshmeat. Abiword could end up, over time, being more featureful than MS-Word, and yet not truly be bloatware because those features would be optional. They'd also be likely to be more stable than Word's esoteric functions, because each plugin would (in theory) have a different maintainer (not unlike Debian structure). (Although a database of extraneous Word macros may exist somewhere, I don't know.)
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
I've been using AbiWord now, since sometime during 0.5.x development. I've written a few school papers with it, and it works great. It's perfectly stable (except when I tried importing a PNG file, but that doesn't matter to me), and incredibly fast.
I think that AbiWord should definitely go the plug-in route, as mentioned above. Then you'd have a GIMP-like product, with all sorts of nifty features. They could host something like plugins.gimp.org.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
How does AbiWord's features/size compare with the Win32 text editor TextPad? I use this app all the time, from Java programming, to HTML authoring, to short documents and reports, and I am looking for a similar lightweight(more features than notepad, MUCH less size & bloat than Word), graphical(GUI & polished) editor for Linux(closest thing I've tried is good 'ol Pico). If AbiWord is not what I'm looking for, is there anything out there that is?
Respectfully,
Kevin Christie
kwchri@maila.wm.edu
I use word on a daily basis and routinely cut and paste large areas, and I have never had it crash. And this is on a BETA of WinWord 2000.
I routinely cut and paste entire HTML documents into Word.. (one of the lovely things about IE and Word is that if you cut and paste a table or a HTML list, it turns into a Word table or an HTML table. This is unlike Netscape which discards all of the HTML structure and turns an HTML cut/paste into pure ascii text)
Difference experiences I guess?
Of course, being able to cut-and-paste and crash once in a while is infinitely better than not being able to cut-and-paste at all between some X apps which is a frequent occurance on poorly coded Linux apps.
(hmm, do they use X Selection? or do they use another technique? what's the cut-and-paste key de jour?)
Try deleting DELME.TXT (i think that's the extension).. Office won't work when you delete it, apparently.
Embedding graphics is the only thing missing for
me at the moment. Obviously some people will miss
something from such massively featured packages as
Word or WordPerfect, but remember how many years
development have gone into those.
Personally I hope that if AbiWord does start to
have more esoteric features, that the developers
come up with a simple plugin module that makes
all such addons optional.
The elegance and low memory footprint of AbiWord
are one of its coolest features. I hope they don't
eventually make it dependent on Gnome libs, as I
like the fact it needs little more than Glib and
GTK+. For my stripped down FreeBSD machine at
work, this is perfect as it is.
Chris Wareham
What about any schmucks with near-meaningless business jargon like "core value proposition"? What is source-code availability if not valuable? If I ran a company with specific and known troubles with a certain WP (for instance the problem with apostrophes when Word files are imported into other WPs), wouldn't it be valuable to have a WP which allowed such things to either dissappear totally or be coded around?
I don't feel that MS Word is a great application
How's that for "core value"?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I'm working on a comparison of open-source tools. Don't hold your breath though; it'll be a couple of weeks before I can tackle it in earnest.
-- Dirt Road
Netscape Composer is not a word processor. It is a tool to create broken HTML.
/mill
HTML is not a suitable format for a word processor. It is meant for hypertext and too limited for a word processor. Additionally, until user agents support CSS2 or maybe XSL (where ever it is heading) word processors exporting to HTML _will_ produce broken HTML. Just like Netscape Composer.
I thought AbiWord used an application of XML as native file format?
Maybe one day we will have a word processor that seperates structure from appearence. A word processor that makes it natural to think about structure and content rather than appearence when creating the information. Oh well.
This is great!
So small for what it does... StarOffice is a huge resource pig, almost unusable as far as I'm concerned.
WordPerfect has been nothing but a pain in my ass... after finally getting it installed it crashed at the slightest provokation.
Best of all AbiWord is free(speech)!!! I never understood why people would recommend proprietary POS like StarOffice and WordPerfect... the last thing Linux needs is a closed source office suite.
Tried to check the site out and even download it, but it seems they got majorly slashdotted. Oh, well...
That apostrophe thing is (surprise!) Word's fault. Office uses so-called `smart quotes' that are in non-standard positions in the character maps. When you save it as RTF, Word doesn't replace them with true apostrophes, so they are lost if you read them in any other editor. The intent is to get people like you to believe that it is the fault of the other editor.
Of course, WordPerfect uses `smart quotes' too, but when you save it outside the format used by WP 6/7/8/9, it converts them to regular quotes. Also, it can be told to use straight quotes after numbers instead of the curly quotes, which Word cannot do.
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
Has anyone ever done a point-by-point feature comparison of the various word processorts available for Linux? I'm using Star Office....but with so many to choose from, I'd be interested in seeing them compete head-to-head.
Werd.
Office 2000's "save as HTML" will save extended XML tags, using a unique namespace, for anything that HTML 4 is unable to represent. However, I think Abi need to release a _lot_ more information about their file format, and should also work a bit more closely with other teams to define a single standard base (which you can extend trivially via namespaces). They need to chat to the kword people.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
This is good news -- I'm glad they're making progress on AbiWord.
I really hope AbiSoft can succeed with AbiWord and their other efforts. They're a company that seems to be doing all the right things, both politically and technically (well, maybe not all, but you get the idea) and they deserve to succeed -- GPL-licensed open source code, XML document formats, GTK-based UI, etc.
Best of Luck, AbiSoft!
Just another AC
The question isn't hardware costs but software. A brand new copy of Office whatever runs several hundred dollars if you want the full suite. SQL server starts at several hundred and goes up into thousands of dollars. Did you pay for those licenses? Are they properly licensed? If so, you spent a whole lot more than $300.
Maybe you can afford the $?,??? to buy NT server and SQL server and run Quake2 on your server (hahaha), but that doesn't mean you got a license to troll.
If you really understand what's going on under the hood in Win/Office 2000, you really won't want to talk about it.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Any of you know a good viewer that doesn't
implement it's own tags? Preferably pure
RTF1.0
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
you have the art of disputing fact with hateful words down rather well... Besides you fall in to a
dangerous trap with your words... Stereotyping... That somehow because I read Slashdot I choose
some piece of code as my religion. That somehow I have not the capacity to make my own choices.
Be careful with words they're far more then a few pixels on a screen...
"We want to take over the world, but we don't want to do it tomorrow, it's OK if it's next week"-- Linus Torvalds
At least, more money than they're spending/losing? I haven't seen any financial numbers for this company, so if you're just assuming that they're in the black, I'd say that's a pretty big assumption. Even the CIO of Burlington Coat Factory, who's planning to buy over 1000 Linux boxes from Dell (if they haven't done so already), says, "I suppose Red Hat's business model makes sense to somebody, but it makes no sense to us."
FWIW, AbiSource's president (who I would hope knows his way around Linux) wrote an article on the joys of installing Red Hat Linux 6.0, which is worth a read for the goofballs out there who think that everyone should throw away their Macs or Windows software and start installing Linux.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Slashdot Realist
Well, I say this is a GREAT development, though perhaps a little overhyped at the moment. The reason I say this is that though it is indeed looking better and better with every passing moment, it is still has a ways to go before it catches up to the levels of maturity that products like Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect are at. AbiWord still lacks many features that any sensible critic would rightly point out are essential in a modern word processor. And ultimately, the fact of the matter is, people will not make the switch to an open source product like this unless it offers them at LEAST the minimal set of features that they NEED to get real work done. I don't think AbiWord has reached that level yet.
But this is still good--it is always good to see competition. Given a little more time, I think this product may well be in a position to compete head-to-head with Corel soon, not only for technical merits, but for its licensing terms. WordPerfect, though it may be free, it is still essentially proprietary. And if given the choice between two products that are almost identical on technical merits, I believe people will then start making the choice based on which one has more liberal licensing terms. Therefore, this might ultimately also put pressure on Corel to open-source their code as well, maybe under terms similar to those of licenses like the NPL and MPL. In my opinion, these are VERY good open source licenses to look at (and possibly model after), which even take business considerations into account. (But that's a slightly different topic.)
Anyway, my main point is that I think it is healthy to see competition like this that might lead to more open sourcing of proprietary products. If this trend continues, maybe someday we will in fact see nothing but open source software as a result. Now wouldn't THAT be wonderful!
As somebody who's *worked* at MS, it was bloody
obvious how unstable NT4SP3 was. As in:
deterministically crashing during installation.
As in: crashing frequently during use. As in:
running pathetically slowly if, say, Outlook was
there. I've *been* there. I've seen employees
*refuse* to use Betas on their office machines,
because of instabilities. And gawd, the number
of fatal bugs they've shipped...
Secondly, using XML as a native file format is one of the most brilliant ideas, as far as I am concerned anyway. This would mean that I could do less abiworddoc, and, if necessary, I could write some quickie perl script to do some processing and formatting for output myself if AbiWord wasn't available. (Does it look like a document format like this would make sense to MicroSoft ? Didn't think so). Of course, in an ideal case, I wouldn't need to.
If you are doing lots of work with XML, definintely look into sgrep. (sgrep stands for "structured grep".) This is a very, very cool little utility that no one who does much with structured markup should be without.
However, Abiword was using an extremely ugly DTD so reading the generated XML is likely to be rather unpleasant, unless they've changed it to something cleaner in the interim. I haven't looked at the project in a while, so I couldn't really say for certain.
I have made the i386 RPM available here (for a short time).
--
I was interested in your comment about separating structure from appearance in WP formats. I was involved in defining such an ISO standard called ODA (ISO 8613). This was about the time SGML was going through the same standards route. ODA was based on just this idea but it was very difficult to get people to accept that that's what's needed. Never mind it will come.
Have you tried reading abiword documents with a simple text reader (like, less) ? It would've at least shown the folly of your statement.
Abiword's native format is XML.
Wow! If true (and I have few doubts), it would help explain why I couldn't quite .doc-format. Thanks
get the formatting to come out correctly in saving from StarOffice into
for pointing this out.
It's very slow, even here in the UK at 9:45 in the morning.
I don't know If I trust an editor that I couln't get to cut+paste without it crashing and taking half a page with it (BTW this was the "stable" WORD 97)... Of course YMMV...
"We want to take over the world, but we don't want to do it tomorrow, it's OK if it's next week"-- Linus Torvalds
I've been using AbiWord for about a month now,
having come to the conclusion that GWP development
has ground to a halt. I haven't checked out the
go word processor yet, but AbiWord is magnificent.
The export to HTML and printing to file is perfect
as far as I can see, which means I haven't touched
a LaTeX file for weeks!
Chris Wareham
Actually, AbiWord has some ability to import Word97 format files, I'm not sure how good it is on very complex files (tables and inline images aren't working yet, so who knows) But it imported most of my documents without any problems.
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
Word is not a resource hog or sluggish until you actually try to do something with it. I have several word documents that become extremely sluggish when repaginating or moving over large graphics.
.dvi or .ps. Admittedly, the .dvi or .ps can take some time. However, I believe that this is the better way of editting very long and complex documents.
At least in LaTeX or TeX, your can edit your text using any text editor and there is no delay in the editting process until you generate a
Let's face it: a new word processor can have all the features in the world, but if it can't read or write the latest MS Word format, then it's going to be of limited use. Abi didn't mention anything about it. I noticed that the KOffice FAQ basically said that it's impossible to read binary formats, so forget about Word compatibility. SO I'm not going to bother downloading that one. But it seems to me that if StarOffice and WordPerfect can read these files, then between the two OSS office suite projects, filters should be able to be written.
Tragedy! Heh heh heh.
I write apps for me.
End users can buy commercially developed stuff, I don't care.
Nate
You should try out the incredible LyX. It does
exactly this being based on LaTeX. The web site
is http://www.lyx.org. And it's GPL'ed too....
Why with such spite?
First off, Yes to the difference in experince I've had many troubles with MS products in both a home and office environment. I had a bunch of computers that were crashing at one site because Critical Update Notification (the newest ver) was crashing every hour or so. and before that it was blue screens of death. What do you tell a small buisness operator who's not sure they should have spent any money in upgradeing when they just spent major money in new computers direct off an assembly line and they're giving Blue Screens multiple times a day?
secondly about x...it's being worked on...but it's not a reason to be spiteful on it.
As for poorly coded apps... heheh you've never downloaded windows shareware have you? heheh
"We want to take over the world, but we don't want to do it tomorrow, it's OK if it's next week"-- Linus Torvalds
Just yesterday I had a big fight regarding mission critical RTF-format files I'd saved from Word and tried to bring up in StarOffice, but were somehow missing apostrophes. If this thing doesn't make that mistake - and I'm sure it won't - I will NEVER use proprietary software again, or at least not on my own boxes.
Looks like they're getting /.-ed
Why did MS give away IE? So that it could (in theory) gain market share and get rid of the competition. The price could then be jacked up to a keen US$50 per copy or so. As long as a lot of people use Abiword, it doesn't *really* matter if they pay for a copy. By virtue of having written the product, the Abisoft folks will be the most qualified to go in and add stuff to Abiword or Abioffice or Abiwhatever. They'll control the growth and direction of a widely-used piece of software. There's gads of money to be made in a situation like that. Mindshare pays off in the long run.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Secondly, using XML as a native file format is one of the most brilliant ideas, as far as I am concerned anyway. This would mean that I could do less abiworddoc , and, if necessary, I could write some quickie perl script to do some processing and formatting for output myself if AbiWord wasn't available. (Does it look like a document format like this would make sense to MicroSoft ? Didn't think so). Of course, in an ideal case, I wouldn't need to.
I, for one, will support the development of AbiSource if for no other reason than helping them set an example (if there is such an example to be set after the success of RedHat). It should show that Open Source is the best development model - not because it brings the most money to the company, but because it brings out the best software - which is what every user should want.
On my P166 NT4.0 with 96mb of ram, Office 2000's Winword uses only 3964kb memory with 2404kb
resident.
I just don't understand the level of BLATANT FUD that appears on Slashdot. I'm a Linux user and I'm SICK OF IT.
Word is *NOT* Sluggish and *NOT* a resource hog on my system. The only thing Office chews up is disk space, which frankly, I don't care about.
On the computer next to it, I have a Celeron overclocked to 450Mhz with 64mb of RAM with the same result: no sluggish behavior at all. And that Celeron system only cost me $250 to put together. In fact, the P166 system cost 5x the
price when it was first bought.
Are Linux users pimply faced teens who save up their allowance to buy 486s or something?
Linux also *CHEWS* up mega-diskspace with hundreds of utilities I never use. Oh? I can chose not to install all the utilities? Well, with Office2000 (and even Office97), you can deselect whatever packages you don't want. It even does self-repair (for corrupted installation, just go ahead, delete a DLL), and Install-ON demand, so if you deselect the spell-checker, but then try to use it, it will load that component.
AbiWord has a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
Don't even DARE to compare them if you don't use Word processors at all and only use mainly Emacs or VIM. You frankly, don't have the experience with WP's to make a comparison. WP's are used by people who write documents everyday for print. Not code, Not web sites, Not email.
The only difference between Microsoft FUD and Linux FUD is that MS FUD is centralized and comes from MS. Linux FUD is a distributed system, spewed out of thousands of people.
I guess open-collaborative development does work when it comes to lying about MS products?
Did I mention that my NT box running SQLServer, various incarnations of Quake2 (when I feel like it), Office2000, browsers, IIS, Symantec Cafe, etc has only bluescreened (crashed) ONCE in the last 6 months (after an IE5 install) So much for the fairy tales on Slashdot that make it look like NT can't run for a few hours without crashing.
Perform the following test: Load up Winword on NT4. Load up a document. Bring up the Task Monitor. Look at the memory usage. Wow, you mean Winword is only taking 3mb of RAM when loaded Fresh? And a 50kb document only bumps memory usage by another 250kb resident?
"AbiSource software is available for all to use, free of charge. Like most Open Source companies, we make our money selling a variety of services and resources. While our software is free, the additional services and resources which we sell are not."
It's nice to have more people making money from the Open Source model, rather than the standard models. They create a baseline of quality for the rest of the industry to follow and provide a high-quality alternative to those who don't want to shell out for the full office suite.
æeee!
> The only thing Office chews up is disk space, which frankly, I don't care about.
> Linux also *CHEWS* up mega-diskspace with hundreds of utilities I never use.
So, which is it? You care or don't care?
> Oh? I can chose not to install all the utilities? Well, with Office2000 (and even Office97), you can deselect whatever packages you don't want.
Try not installing "Fast Find". Go ahead. And what do you find in your startup group anyways?
> Don't even DARE to compare them if you don't use Word processors at all and only use mainly Emacs or VIM. You frankly, don't have the experience with WP's to make a comparison. WP's are used by people who write documents everyday for print. Not code, Not web sites, Not email.
False for many reasons:
* Tried that, didn't like it, went back to text editor. Still have the (short) experience to comment.
* Text editors are used every day for documents. Ever hear of Latex? XML?
* Micros~1 Word is expected to be used for non-Word9x-format work. Look at its HTML extension module. If it wanders into text land, it should take its lumps.
* Micros~1 is moving its proprietary formats into non-document areas, like email. You even get tangled by Word viruses when you get email (sometimes even without clicking on the attachment--Remember the Netscape "File menu" bug?), so the Word processor preferences (overfeatured) DOES apply -- maybe I *want* a slim formatted text processor.
> Perform the following test: Load up Winword on NT4. Load up a document. Bring up the Task Monitor. Look at the memory usage. Wow, you mean Winword is only taking 3mb of RAM when loaded Fresh?
Hah! All of the DLLs are not recorded with WinWord! I'll betcha you've got Micros~1 Office Taskbar loaded, too. The _only_ reason that thing exists is to load the fat (1MB+) DLLs at boot time, so that Word itself isn't perceived to be slow when it is loaded. And how many other DLLs does that thing call?
Let's give the Abi folks a little slack on this. The .7 release is the first one that claims to have a stable file format, so I think they are entitled to some time to post the specs. But if you are really in a hurry, GO READ THE CODE. It will all be in there.
As for Microsoft, they are going to have to be a hell of a lot more paniced then they are now before they really open their file formats. At this point I take their XML stance as hot air. They make huge amounts from users upgrading Office for the sole reason of maintaining file compatibility. And making huge amounts is what they want to do.