AbiWord Community Outreach Project

and we mean it - in this episode of Blogosphere Quickies, we’ve got blog entries in languages other than English, many of which I can’t understand (and so I hope that either they are positive, or someone fluent in that language can help them out)… Most of these (all except the first) are 2.4.5 release notices.

• Russian - This is actually quite a popular language in the realm of AbiWord blog posts (as well as download referrals) - here’s a recent one I’ve seen. We’re not doing the greatest in their poll, but that’s probably because all the people using AbiWord are too impressed to surf the web anymore . http://gluek.info/2006/04/26/abiword-free-word-processor/
• Spanish - There are a few entries in Spanish that I see - the advantage to me posting these entries is that I can tell what they say before I link to them http://picallo.nexus-host.de/?p=78. (Yes, there is some irony that the link is hosted on a German server.)
• Arabic (?) - Looks Arabic to me, at least it is a non-Latin script. Hopefully the users from this site file bugs if they find problems in our complex script rendering - feedback on these features is important and sometimes hard to come by (native users can be few and far between, and most devs don’t know what “correct behavior” looks like). http://bandatlas.mihanblog.com/post-216.aspx
• Polish (guessing from domain) - This is a brief summary on a download page. Our releases get displayed on a lot of different domains sometimes starting even before the official release of a version. http://download.chip.pl/download_173920.html?rss
• Italian - We even get four stars and accurate platform support info (Windows, Linux, Mac) on this page! Other than that, it’s essentially the above page - just a nice download link on a local downloads site. http://news.swzone.it/swznews-18099.php
• Dutch - Now this is an interesting one! Not only do they show a splash screen created by Daniel d’Andrada T. de Carvalho but never used in a release, they also show what appears to be an ancient build of AbiWord on Linux (probably around a pre-1.0 version!) in the screenshot! Marc Maurer, the stable maintainer, is even a native of the Netherlands (and so he can even read this review), he should crack down and get them a nicer looking screenshot so we look like a 2006 word processor, not a 1998 one http://www.techzine.nl/downloads/11931/AbiWord-2.4.5.html
• Chinese (? Some CJK script…) - I wish I could read more than the trademarks here! Just like Arabic, CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean) scripts are a bit trickier than usual to deal with in AbiWord, so hopefully we get some valuable bug reports (or a confirmation that everything works well) from these users too! http://www.ruanyifeng.com/it/archives/12

If anyone else runs across another language release notice or similar, please don’t be afraid to drop me an email, or leave a comment!

Keep marching around the globe, ants!