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AbiWord 1.0.1 Released
GNOME | Posted by michael
on Thursday May 09, @03:46AM
from the
spellcheck-for-everyone dept.
plam writes "After 3 years of hacking,
the AbiWord team has unleashed AbiWord 1.0.1 upon
the world. AbiWord is a Free cross-platform word processor which runs on Linux
and Windows, MacOS X, QNX, FreeBSD, Solaris and others. AbiWord is small and
compact (20 times smaller than OpenOffice!), yet contains most of the features
found in larger word processors, including Word and WordPerfect
import/export."

gnugnugnu  (178215)

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Release announcement
by plam on Thursday May 09, @03:54AM
(Score:5, Informative) (#3488613)

(User #123263 Info) [
Neutral ]

I didn't include it in the story, but here's our AbiWord 1.0.1 release
announcement.

The AbiWord team is proud to announce the release of
AbiWord version 1.0.1, a free-software Word Processing program. More
than three years in the making, AbiWord is a reliable, cross-platform
word processor with many powerful features.

AbiWord aims at
robust inter-operability with existing products, including Microsoft
Word(R), Corel WordPerfect(R), and others. AbiWord's goal is to
incorporate the most useful features of these competing applications
without the fluff, bloat, or slowness that generally accompany
them.

Translations and spell checking are available for more 30
different languages. An English Language Thesaurus for use within
AbiWord can also be freely downloaded.

We have not yet
implemented tables or footnotes. Tables and footnotes are the first
priority for our next development phase. We have already made impressive
progress toward this and other new features.

AbiWord is available
for Linux and other Unix variants, Windows, Mac OSX and QNX.
You can
learn more about AbiWord from our website at http://www.abiword.com/.

AbiWord can be downloaded from
http://www.abiword.com/download/.

AbiWord was initially developed
by SourceGear Inc.; today, AbiWord development has been continued by a
worldwide team of volunteer developers. AbiWord is free software
available under the GNU General Public License.

The AbiWord team
can be contacted via email at:
[email-masked].

[ Parent
]

3
replies beneath your current threshold.

WordPerfect
by rubinson on Thursday May 09, @04:20AM (Score:5,
Insightful) (#3488722)

(User #207525 Info) http://www.grundrisse.org/ [
Neutral ]

If the WordPerfect filters are decent, this is--for me, at least--huge.
WordPerfect still has a strong presence in certain industries. Law is
frequently mentioned but many academics are still using WordPerfect as
well. Indeed, I keep a copy of WordPerfect 8 for Linux (the native
version, not that crappy Wine port) on my machine for occassional file
from my colleagues (as well as for a handful of my own files from my days
of using WP).

I no longer have any need for Word thanks to
OpenOffice; perhaps AbiWord will permit me to eliminate the last of my
proprietary applications from my desktop.

[ Parent
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Lets hear it for table support!
by Leghk on Thursday May 09,
@04:25AM (Score:5, Informative) (#3488740)

(User #30302 Info) [
Neutral ]

Abiword turns out to be a pretty good word processor. I plopped one of
my roommates, who exclusivly had used Microsoft Windows up until this
point, down infront of abiword a couple months ago. He was able to write a
couple grad school application essays without any complaints, or without
asking for any assistance. He even got his printer working without any
assistance. That's quite a feat. I'm not sure you could plop a windows
user down infront of a Mac and have them be able to to figure their way
around so well.

Unfortunately, using abiword for my work is totally
useless. While abiword has attacked the home market user, it hasn't paid
much attention to the business user. By far the biggest piece of
functionality abiword lacks is table support. I can't think of a
single document (mostly technical I guess) I've had to write for work
which did not somewhere in the document contain a table. Unfortunately
abiword simply doesn't support tables, and trying to import a word
document with tables, the tables just get flattened with linefeeds instead
of cells. I'm not even sure how you could write a lab report using abiword
without table support. Maybe you could make a table in gnumeric and paste
in an image.

This is very unfortunate because everything else about
abiword is quite spectacular. It is so much lighter weight then
openoffice, and so much more of a pleasure to use, but, unfortunately,
I'll have to continue using openoffice for a little whlie
longer.

If I could program C or C++ worth a damn, I would
definately do something about this! (That and allowing gnumeric to import
a tab delimited file form the commandline). Alas, these Java hands of mine
are useless! I feel like I should be able to help, and not just complain
it. But I really can't. Maybe I can go bake the abiword people some
cookies instead.

[ Parent
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TOTALLY MADE UP QUOTES
by gnugnugnu on Thursday May 09,
@04:47PM (Score:1) (#3491352)

(User #178215 Info) http://kuro5hin.org/ | Last Journal: http://slashdot.org/~gnugnugnu/journal/

Some amusing quotes (quoted verbatim) from the Abiword mailing
list
http://abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/02/M
ay/0330.html

If there'd been more advance notice, it might have
been fun to do the
standard press release trick of soliciting quotes
from *other people* to
introduce those ideas.

For example, here
are some TOTALLY MADE UP QUOTES, putting words in the
mouths of
prominent people that I KNOW VERY WELL THEY'D NEVER SAY:

"AbiWord is the latest and finest example of the kinds of
powerfully
usable software that can be developed,
from scratch, by a world-wide
team of volunteers
collaborating under the terms of the GNU GPL.
More
free software! I love it!"
-- Richard Stallman,
Free Software Foundation

"I never leave kernel mode
unless I have to. I try to leave all that

pixel-pushing stuff out in userland to others. Thank goodness
for
the folks on the AbiWord team. Now I can skim
all those useless email
attachments before I
delete them!"
-- Linus Torvalds,
Linux

"Hey, how come we're the only major desktop
operating system that
AbiWord doesn't run natively
on? What do I have to do to get someone to
finish
the Cocoa port? Can I just sneak them into the next Pixar
release
party or will I actually have to pay
them?"
-- Steve Jobs, Apple

"AbiSource ... has started developing, in particular, a very
high-quality
word processor for the Linux
environment."
-- Paul Maritz, Microsoft Sr VP of
platforms and applications

Oops. Actually, the last quote *is*
real:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/trial/transcrip ts/jan99/01-28-am.asp

--
Totally Karma Whoring...

[ Parent
]

Re:tables????
by Troodon on Thursday May 09, @04:07AM
(Score:5, Informative) (#3488671)

(User #213660 Info) http://slashdot.org/ [
Neutral ]

According to this
manual section [abisource.com] it appears to offer very basic table
support.

"This will allow you to create simple tables. More sophisticated
table support is the major feature planned for AbiWord 1.2. The developers
already know that it is needed, and are already working on it."

[ Parent
]

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Re:is there anything like this coming out??
by plam on
Thursday May 09, @04:11AM (Score:5, Informative) (#3488686)

(User #123263 Info) [
Neutral ]

Abi is an ant
[abisource.com]. She's blue.

As for spreadsheets, in the near
future we release code which is able to embed
Abiword files in Gnumeric [unimelb.edu.au] and allows
Evolution to use AbiWord to read emails [unimelb.edu.au].

[ Parent
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Re:Tables, Equations, Footnotes
by plam on Thursday May 09,
@04:19AM (Score:5, Informative) (#3488715)

(User #123263 Info) [
Neutral ]

No equations in the forseeable future. But, we're accepting patches. If
you just send a patch to abiword-dev[AT]abisource.com, it will most likely
be committed that day.

Tables and footnotes/endnotes will be in
1.2. We are overhauling the layout engine to support them.

Tables
are nontrivial to implement correctly. Currently, if you really want
tables, you can simulate them using tabs and over/underlining.

I
started implementing endnotes[1] a while ago, but I got distracted by real
life. They're not that hard, though, and once we have a new and more
powerful layout engine, footnotes and endnotes should be fairly easy to
implement.

[1] Footnotes go at the bottom of each page; endnotes go
at the end of each section.

[ Parent
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3
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Re:Grammar Checking...
by rubinson on Thursday May 09,
@04:40AM (Score:5, Informative) (#3488813)

(User #207525 Info) http://www.grundrisse.org/ [
Neutral ]

Thus, I end up using MS Word for these things, not only because my
professors only deal with MS Word format, but also because of the added
feature of grammar checking.

You might the Unix utilities
"style" and "diction." They don't do "grammar" checking per say (i.e.,
they don't cite passive voice or subject-verb agreement) but this is
rather simple stuff that you should catch anyways.

Diction
identifies (and suggests remedies for) commonly misused phrases and
lengthy sentences. Style evaluates the complexity of [sections of] your
document.

I don't think that I'm describing them very well, but, as
an academic, I've found them (along with wordnet and ispell) to be
indispensible. And they're probably already installed on your system.
Check 'em out.

The homepage:
http://www.gnu.org/software/diction/diction.html

[ Parent
]

Re:Grammar Checking...
by Bronster on Thursday May 09,
@05:06AM (Score:5, Funny) (#3488878)

(User #13157
Info) http://brong.net/ [
Neutral ]

You might the Unix utilities "style" and
"diction."

You might the Unix utilities yourself,
Yoda.

Strong in this one the force is.

[ Parent
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Re:Grammar Checking...
by autechre on Thursday May 09,
@05:09AM (Score:5, Insightful) (#3488889)

(User #121980 Info) http://wmbc.umbc.edu/ [
Neutral ]

I've never actually seen the grammar checker in Microsoft Office do
anything useful. I think it's a bit fiddly to have a computer attempt to
do such a thing in the first place (like a spell checker, it certainly
won't catch all of the errors). I've often disagreed with it.

The
best method by far (IMHO) is to have someone else proofread your writing.
If he is also a writer, you can trade. When proofreading your own work,
errors will often slip by, because your brain knows what _should_ be on
the page.

It's also very helpful to read a lot of edited material
(books, newspapers, etc.). _The_Elements_of_Style_ is a nice
guide.

http://wmbc.umbc.edu/ [umbc.edu]
WMBC
Freeform/Independant online radio

[ Parent
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