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AbiWord 0.7 release 59

Posted by Hemos from the download-run-get dept.
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. "
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AbiWord 0.7 release More

AbiWord 0.7 release

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  • 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.
  • 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.)
  • 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.
  • 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
  • I would suggest taking a look at Nedit. It's a GUI text editor that I've been using on Solaris to write text, email, HTML, Perl, and C. While it doesn't seem appropriate as a word processor, it does have syntax highlighting for coding, and splitable windows. I just wouldn't try to write a multicolumn newletter with pictures using it...

    Good luck!
  • I regard starting a business based on politics or a gimmick technology, and not a core value proposition, as a losing proposition.


    It just so happens that in todays market, any smuck can IPO with a dumb idea. The gravy train will eventually end however.


    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 ... it has a lot of features, it's true, but that itself is a fairly neutral quality - depends what you're using it for. But I know that Word crashes on my Mac (and on my last PC) frequently, and Linux Wordperfect (not to mention text-based editors) never have. AbiWord looks famililar to anyone who's used a GUI word processor, and is extensible to incorporate needed feature.

    How's that for "core value"?

    timothy
  • Netscape Composer is not a word processor. It is a tool to create broken HTML.

    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.

    /mill

  • Awesome! (Score:2)

    by GypC ( 7592 )

    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
    --

  • There is some graphics support in there, it's just that at the moment then only format that's supported is PNG. Hopefully once the W3C Scaleable Vector Graphics standard is ready, they'll add support for that too.
  • 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.
  • 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.

    perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-: ,hacker Perl another Just)'
  • 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.
  • Any of you know a good viewer that doesn't
    implement it's own tags? Preferably pure
    RTF1.0

  • 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...

  • But _are_ they making money? (Score:4)

    by Zico ( 14255 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @11:37PM (#1885893)

    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 [abisource.com], 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

  • So what does this mean? (Score:3)

    by SuperDee ( 14231 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @11:26PM (#1885894)
    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!

  • Re:AbiWord and XML (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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 [student.dtu.dk] (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.
  • I do wish Abi saved directly in XML instead of its own format.

    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.

  • It's very slow, even here in the UK at 9:45 in the morning.
  • So often, you see these college-quality projects where someone goals "I want to use all the newest buzzwords. My project should use GPL, CORBA, GTK, Baboon, XML, RDF, XSL, Tuplespace, OODBMS, ...." and that is before the specs for the real app have been written. Basically, "I want to work on this cool technology, and I'll eventually think of an application to use it."

    If you looked at AbiWord more closely, you would see how these "gimmick technologies" and "buzzwords" make sense to the creators of AbiWord.

    1. GPL. This makes sense, because the license will attract developers. An Open Source license doesn't automatically mean it's quality software, but so far it looks good for me.
    2. GTK. They are using a GUI library which already exists on every distribution, making it a lot simpler for people to install it (no extra packages necessary). The look-and-feel of AbiWord will also be instantly familiar to anyone who has used GTK applications.
    3. XML. Another very smart choice, which I discovered recently, when I hand-edited an abiword document with a plain text editor (removed a picture which abiword had failed to remove). Not only that, but as it text-based, XML is extremely portable.

    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.

  • 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...
  • 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.
  • 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
  • yeah, well the people in the SGML newsgroup say that the XML tags in an Office 2000 document cannot be processed by standard XML tools. how surprising.
  • 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....
  • Australia 20:00 hrs, also very very slow.
    So slow in fact, my first thought was that it had been slashdotted
  • 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
  • I don't suppose anyone would be kind enough to put this up on a server we could all get to to download it?
  • I suspect they need to have a _product_ before they start making any money.
  • 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.

  • AbiWord notes (Score:5)

    by Camelot ( 17116 ) on Thursday May 20, 1999 @01:59AM (#1885919)
    For those who are not familiar with the economics of running a start-up company, it should be pointed out that aren't necessarily making any money, and it's not altogether necessary that they should at this point. Like their FAQ says,
    We
    will be selling...
    Who knows what else these guys are doing while are waiting for the business to start blooming ? It doesn't matter if you doubt their business model as long as their investors don't.

    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.

  • It's pretty basic, comparable to wordpad. IMO, kword/koffice has more potential. It's a complete office suite where the components can be embedded in each other. Koffice is still beta at this point though.

    For a decent office suite , the only choice IMO is Applix. Star Office is too much of a pig. Applix is lighter and faster. It also allows one to use ttfonts in the word processor ( and does a much better job at font rendering. )

    Word perfect is good, but it's just a stand alone word processor, not an office suite.


  • 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 LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG way to go to even compare to Wordpad, and you people are comparing it against Wordperfect and Word?

    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?

  • Read their mission statement (Score:3)

    by Rayban ( 13436 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @10:54PM (#1885922) Homepage
    "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.
  • abiword is indeed a joy to use.

    I had to upgrade my RAM to 64MB for StarOffice4, and to 128MB for StarOffice5. Abiword weighs in at 5MB total with the multi-page document open - a breath of fresh air.

    Sure, it's a bit sparse in the feature dept. at the moment, but then who ever uses all those features? I'd rather have a small and fast Word-alike that my mother can use, than the huge bloatware of StarOffice, which even with 128MB still isn't exactly nippy.

    The features will be added in time i'm sure. The nice part is that they will built onto a nice lean foundation.

    (and i can recompile abiword to run on linux/alpha - something i can't do with StarOffice)
  • 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.

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