The Link-Grammar team is separate from the AbiWord team... Link-grammar is a university-sponsored research project that was licensed such that we were able could incorporate it into AbiWord 2.4. Their design decisions, not ours.:)
Our Mac version is admittedly a little shakier than our Linux and Windows versions, but import/export should be ok. If you've found a reproducable crash, please let us know at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ , preferably with a sample document, so that we can fix the problem you are having.
I'm afraid I don't understand your question. AbiWord has great support for spellchecking, using ASpell, HSpell, and other libraries on Linux through Enchant, AppleSpell on Mac, and our own spell-checker based on (I believe) Ispell with many dictionaries available on Windows.
Stop by http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ and file a bug, making sure to tell us your distribution. Or, just pop by our IRC channel or user mailing list, and we'll do our best to help you out there.
What distribution do you use? The latest AbiWord is in Ubuntu 5.10, and should be hitting Debian Testing quite soon (within a day or two). These are ideal solutions. If you are not using one of these distros, please file a bug at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ about the AutoPackage, and we'll see what we can do.
As has been brought up by countless posters, though a "grammar checker" (really more of just a grammar parser) is by no means a replacement for proper proofreading, it does serve to pick up a variety of errors (word duplication, wrong word, etc) that a spell checker cannot, and therefore does serve a useful purpose for many users.
Link Grammar was developed for English, and currently that is all that it supports. If someone would generate the necessary dictionary and rules files, however, under a compatible license, we'd (AbiWord, and probably Link-Grammar as well) love to have your contribution.
Well, we do use it for that... Give it a shot! You're right, it does get a little slow on loading huge documents, but it's not too bad, especially (to my knowledge) considering it's the only useable GPL-compatible, free grammar checker available (at least when the plugin was written).
Of course, my comment didn't mention that AbiWord already has access to many spell checking dictionaries. On most Linux-like systems, AbiWord uses Enchant, which provides access to ASpell, HSpell, and other spell checking engines and dictionaries. On Mac, AbiWord connects to AppleSpell, providing access to all dictionaries included there. On Windows, a variety of dictionaries are available for download both in the initial installer as well as after installation from the AbiSource web site.
Thanks for the compliment! However, since you posted AC on Slashdot, the chance of the mysterious "Format Paragraph" bug you mention getting fixed is even lower that if it were posted and modded up, and far, far lower than if you put it on our bugzilla:D. http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ - Please report any bugs you find so that we can fix them!
The grammar checker is a separate, add-on plugin, and it's actually rather small. On large documents, it does take a while to check the whole thing, but as another poster mentioned, it's completely optional.
Since you're using Windows, if you want to try it out, it's in the Tools plugin installer.
Have you tried 2.4? Each release includes tons of bug fixes in addition to the features that we tout. In fact, if you don't install the grammar checking and other new plugins, the core of AbiWord has had many improvements on its own.
We're proud of the fact that for most users, our LaTeX-like equation editor is actually more productive than Microsoft's.
Maybe you should take a peek at the package... Grammar Checking and Math Editing support are added as plugins. Most distributions provide plugins seperately, and if they don't you can just generally remove the plugin file. On Windows, the installer allows you to select precisely which plugins you want, when you get the separate plugin installers. We understand that part of the appeal of AbiWord is its small size and speed, and we won't comprimise that.
As others have pointed out, a grammar check makes a good companion to a spell check. It's of course not for everyone, but there are many more users of AbiWord than you (and from reading your posting, I wonder if you even gave it a shot), and many of those users would like one. If you want a grammar check, you can install it. If you don't, you can leave it out. How does this not please the greatest number of users?
Have you tried 2.4? Each release includes tons of bug fixes in addition to the features that we tout. In fact, if you don't install the grammar checking and other new plugins, the core of AbiWord has had many improvements on its own.
At the moment, since we use the Link Grammar checker (see the link to the web site in the article), only English is supported. The program has been designed, however, so that additional grammar checkers could be added if suitable GPL or GPL-compatible programs were found.
Have you tried 2.4? Each release includes tons of bug fixes in addition to the features that we tout. In fact, if you don't install the grammar checking and other new plugins, the core of AbiWord has had many improvements on its own.
> xine 1.1 and AbiWord 1.1, unfortunately, were released too late Breezy's dev cycle and aren't included.
Well, there never was an AbiWord 1.1... However, the latest AbiWord 2.4.1 is included in Breezy, as of just a week or so ago - you may want to do another update and dist-upgrade and give it a shot!
(Disclaimer - Yes, I'm a volunteer with the AbiWord folks)
There is one. The Link Grammar tool is a research project that performs English grammar checking. Recently, the AbiWord folks built a plugin for grammar checking which uses Link Grammar that highlights phrases with questionable grammar with green squiggly lines. It isn't perfect, but it definitely works, and works now. The 2.3 development series of AbiWord currently is the only one with this plugin, however, the 2.4 release is weeks away, and 2.3.x is quite stable. For those of you who don't know, AbiWord is a free/open source (GPL) word processor that is full-featured but fast. It runs on Windows, Linux (GTK+ and GNOME versions), and Mac OS X, as well as a new port to the Nokia 770 which is under development by INDt, a Nokia research lab. You can get it here: http://abisource.com/
Full Disclosure - I help out with AbiWord, as the Windows packager for 2.3 and 2.4, as well as some other random things. I started helping because it works great for me, though.
When was the last time you tried AbiWord? I help with Windows QA, and we've advanced by leaps and bounds recently. Recently a really great QA guy has been methodically finding just about every obscure and non-obscure crasher bug you can imagine, and a similarly great coder who's been with the project a lot longer than me has been fixing them lickity-split. It's worth another look.
If your position is such that you can convince them to switch from MS Office (showing the speed or lack thereof of the most recent version on any hardware a school district would have should do the trick), I'd strongly suggest NOT to just install straight Open Office. Most of the time, the word processor is the most-used application, and OOo is simply massive and clumsy if all you're doing is word processing.
I'd suggest installing OOo without Writer, then installing AbiWord (www.abisource.com). It's much smaller, sleeker, and more "finished" feeling. For the number of times word processors are used compared to the other suite tools, your students will thank you for the quick startup. It's also really easy to rescue data in case a file is corrupt: the file format is a simple straight XML, which can be opened in Notepad and text copied and pasted out. No compression or concatenation to wrestle with. It also (for many tasks) has a better Word importer than OOo.
(Disclaimer: I help out with Windows QA and other things for the project at times. I joined it for a reason, though...)
Oops. Boy, do I feel out of it... I missed that article, I now see that was announced on the 12th according to apple.com. Sorry, I really thought it hadn't hit/. yet.
that Apple acknowledged the Tiger release and puts availability on April 29 on their home page, which I haven't seen as an article yet, but would probably also be newsworthy, considering the number of speculation articles and posts I saw.
No, you have that wrong. That is --, which means each time the document is parsed (read, in this context), their goodwill decreases by 1 and is stored to the same variable. Hopefully they didn't forget the semicolon....
Slashdot Mirror
The Link-Grammar team is separate from the AbiWord team... Link-grammar is a university-sponsored research project that was licensed such that we were able could incorporate it into AbiWord 2.4. Their design decisions, not ours. :)
Bug reports are always welcome: http://bugzilla.abisource.com/
Our Mac version is admittedly a little shakier than our Linux and Windows versions, but import/export should be ok. If you've found a reproducable crash, please let us know at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ , preferably with a sample document, so that we can fix the problem you are having.
Thanks for trying AbiWord and helping us out!
I'm afraid I don't understand your question. AbiWord has great support for spellchecking, using ASpell, HSpell, and other libraries on Linux through Enchant, AppleSpell on Mac, and our own spell-checker based on (I believe) Ispell with many dictionaries available on Windows.
Hopefully it will arrive soon on your preferred OS distributions - Ubuntu (breezy/5.10) and Fedora-extras already have it. Enjoy!
Oh, and by the way, if it ever does crash, please let us know at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/
Thanks!
5.10 (Breezy) has AbiWord 2.4.1, so when you do upgrade, uninstall the AutoPackage and try getting it from apt-get. Thanks for using AbiWord!
Stop by http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ and file a bug, making sure to tell us your distribution. Or, just pop by our IRC channel or user mailing list, and we'll do our best to help you out there.
What distribution do you use? The latest AbiWord is in Ubuntu 5.10, and should be hitting Debian Testing quite soon (within a day or two). These are ideal solutions. If you are not using one of these distros, please file a bug at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ about the AutoPackage, and we'll see what we can do.
As has been brought up by countless posters, though a "grammar checker" (really more of just a grammar parser) is by no means a replacement for proper proofreading, it does serve to pick up a variety of errors (word duplication, wrong word, etc) that a spell checker cannot, and therefore does serve a useful purpose for many users.
Link Grammar was developed for English, and currently that is all that it supports. If someone would generate the necessary dictionary and rules files, however, under a compatible license, we'd (AbiWord, and probably Link-Grammar as well) love to have your contribution.
Well, we do use it for that... Give it a shot! You're right, it does get a little slow on loading huge documents, but it's not too bad, especially (to my knowledge) considering it's the only useable GPL-compatible, free grammar checker available (at least when the plugin was written).
Of course, my comment didn't mention that AbiWord already has access to many spell checking dictionaries. On most Linux-like systems, AbiWord uses Enchant, which provides access to ASpell, HSpell, and other spell checking engines and dictionaries. On Mac, AbiWord connects to AppleSpell, providing access to all dictionaries included there. On Windows, a variety of dictionaries are available for download both in the initial installer as well as after installation from the AbiSource web site.
Thanks for the compliment! However, since you posted AC on Slashdot, the chance of the mysterious "Format Paragraph" bug you mention getting fixed is even lower that if it were posted and modded up, and far, far lower than if you put it on our bugzilla :D. http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ - Please report any bugs you find so that we can fix them!
Thanks for using AbiWord!
The grammar checker is a separate, add-on plugin, and it's actually rather small. On large documents, it does take a while to check the whole thing, but as another poster mentioned, it's completely optional.
Since you're using Windows, if you want to try it out, it's in the Tools plugin installer.
Have you tried 2.4? Each release includes tons of bug fixes in addition to the features that we tout. In fact, if you don't install the grammar checking and other new plugins, the core of AbiWord has had many improvements on its own.
We're proud of the fact that for most users, our LaTeX-like equation editor is actually more productive than Microsoft's.
Give it a shot before you flame.
Disclaimer: I'm the Win32 packager for AbiWord.
Maybe you should take a peek at the package... Grammar Checking and Math Editing support are added as plugins. Most distributions provide plugins seperately, and if they don't you can just generally remove the plugin file. On Windows, the installer allows you to select precisely which plugins you want, when you get the separate plugin installers. We understand that part of the appeal of AbiWord is its small size and speed, and we won't comprimise that.
As others have pointed out, a grammar check makes a good companion to a spell check. It's of course not for everyone, but there are many more users of AbiWord than you (and from reading your posting, I wonder if you even gave it a shot), and many of those users would like one. If you want a grammar check, you can install it. If you don't, you can leave it out. How does this not please the greatest number of users?
Have you tried 2.4? Each release includes tons of bug fixes in addition to the features that we tout. In fact, if you don't install the grammar checking and other new plugins, the core of AbiWord has had many improvements on its own.
Disclaimer: I'm the Win32 packager for AbiWord.
At the moment, since we use the Link Grammar checker (see the link to the web site in the article), only English is supported. The program has been designed, however, so that additional grammar checkers could be added if suitable GPL or GPL-compatible programs were found.
Have you tried 2.4? Each release includes tons of bug fixes in addition to the features that we tout. In fact, if you don't install the grammar checking and other new plugins, the core of AbiWord has had many improvements on its own.
Disclaimer: I'm the Win32 packager for AbiWord.
> xine 1.1 and AbiWord 1.1, unfortunately, were released too late Breezy's dev cycle and aren't included.
Well, there never was an AbiWord 1.1... However, the latest AbiWord 2.4.1 is included in Breezy, as of just a week or so ago - you may want to do another update and dist-upgrade and give it a shot!
(Disclaimer - Yes, I'm a volunteer with the AbiWord folks)
There is one. The Link Grammar tool is a research project that performs English grammar checking. Recently, the AbiWord folks built a plugin for grammar checking which uses Link Grammar that highlights phrases with questionable grammar with green squiggly lines. It isn't perfect, but it definitely works, and works now. The 2.3 development series of AbiWord currently is the only one with this plugin, however, the 2.4 release is weeks away, and 2.3.x is quite stable. For those of you who don't know, AbiWord is a free/open source (GPL) word processor that is full-featured but fast. It runs on Windows, Linux (GTK+ and GNOME versions), and Mac OS X, as well as a new port to the Nokia 770 which is under development by INDt, a Nokia research lab. You can get it here: http://abisource.com/
Full Disclosure - I help out with AbiWord, as the Windows packager for 2.3 and 2.4, as well as some other random things. I started helping because it works great for me, though.
Without much poking on the Sun web site, I found that the new x2100, an x64 machine like these, use SATA...
When was the last time you tried AbiWord? I help with Windows QA, and we've advanced by leaps and bounds recently. Recently a really great QA guy has been methodically finding just about every obscure and non-obscure crasher bug you can imagine, and a similarly great coder who's been with the project a lot longer than me has been fixing them lickity-split. It's worth another look.
If your position is such that you can convince them to switch from MS Office (showing the speed or lack thereof of the most recent version on any hardware a school district would have should do the trick), I'd strongly suggest NOT to just install straight Open Office. Most of the time, the word processor is the most-used application, and OOo is simply massive and clumsy if all you're doing is word processing.
I'd suggest installing OOo without Writer, then installing AbiWord (www.abisource.com). It's much smaller, sleeker, and more "finished" feeling. For the number of times word processors are used compared to the other suite tools, your students will thank you for the quick startup. It's also really easy to rescue data in case a file is corrupt: the file format is a simple straight XML, which can be opened in Notepad and text copied and pasted out. No compression or concatenation to wrestle with. It also (for many tasks) has a better Word importer than OOo.
(Disclaimer: I help out with Windows QA and other things for the project at times. I joined it for a reason, though...)
Oops. Boy, do I feel out of it... I missed that article, I now see that was announced on the 12th according to apple.com. Sorry, I really thought it hadn't hit /. yet.
that Apple acknowledged the Tiger release and puts availability on April 29 on their home page, which I haven't seen as an article yet, but would probably also be newsworthy, considering the number of speculation articles and posts I saw.
No, you have that wrong. That is --, which means each time the document is parsed (read, in this context), their goodwill decreases by 1 and is stored to the same variable. Hopefully they didn't forget the semicolon....