[muglo] AbiWord on Mac (a free word processer)

From the YellowDogLinux mailing list:

AbiWord 2.2 for Mac OS X   YDL YDL Newbie

Clinton MacDonald  to Yellow, Yellow
More options     8:46pm (11 minutes ago)

Friends:

The word processor AbiWord is now available for Mac OS X in version 2.2:

<http://www.abisource.com/release-notes/2.2.1.phtml>
<http://www.abisource.com/download/>
<http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/04/1755214&from=rss>

Give this open source alternative to Microsoft Word a try. Here are some
of my thoughts:

I played with AbiWord 2.2 for Mac OS X for a few minutes after
downloading. The interface seems clean and uncluttered, though not 100%
Aqua (the menu bars have a remnant of pinstriping, the interface widgets
and rulers are a little too "dark-gray-on-light-gray"). Nevertheless, I
prefer it to the Windows 98-ish, non-Aqua interface of OpenOffice.org
(shudder -- soooo ugly). The icon is a dignified 3D "A" in a stylized
gold bubble (I sorta miss the cute cartoon ant of previous versions :-)
), and it starts up quickly.

You have to type in the ".abw" suffix when saving files; there is no
option to include it by default. I prefer to set paragraphs at "Exactly
14 pt" rather than "Single spaced," which did not previously work
correctly in a beta version of AbiWord. Saving a file as ".rtf," then
opening it in Microsoft Word revealed that paragraph spacing is not
translated correctly (perhaps because of my "Exactly..." defaults). Oh,
and I did manage to crash AbiWord by clicking a font setting in the
Formatting palette.

Overall, AbiWord shows great promise. It seems fast and can save --
though imperfectly -- in RTF, the lingua franca of word processing
interchange formats. I wish it inherited a little more of Mac OS X's
Aqua look, but that is probably a bit much to ask of a cross-platform
application. I wish that, instead of using its own format, AbiWord had
chosen to support one of the proposed open standard formats for word
processing documents like the XML-based standard that OpenOffice.org
uses (OO.o/Star Office is not one of the choices in the Save dialog).
Also, one of my ongoing needs is for a word processor to have support
for one of the bibliography programs such as EndNote. Does anyone know
if AbiWord has support for something like EndNote in the Open Source
World? Until AbiWord or something else has this support, I will have to
stick to Microsoft Weird.

Give AbiWord a try yourself, and let us know what you think!

Best wishes,
Clint

--
Dr. Clinton C. MacDonald | <mailto:clint DOT macdonald AT sbcglobal DOT net>


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