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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. "
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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).
--
If you looked at AbiWord more closely, you would see how these "gimmick technologies" and "buzzwords" make sense to the creators of AbiWord.
As an end user, these three points do matter to me. And generally my opinion that developers who speak of these technologies usually know what they are talking about.
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.
"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!
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.