AbiWord Community Outreach Project

And unlike everyone else, I didn’t fork this from the Gnome one . I did include an 8-pointed-star as a visual allusion to it, though… If you’re on a Planet, syndicate this far and wide… (in this case, wider than my blog layout apparently…)

Congratulations Gnome folks on the release of Gnome 2.18! I downloaded the live VMWare Player image to give it a spin without upgrading to Feisty, and I found that this demo installation (based on Foresight Linux) includes AbiWord 2.4.6 and Gnumeric as the office tools! Existing Gnome users and those giving the environment a first try will hopefully find a good first impression of the state of the art in open source productivity - and we’re not sitting still: AbiWord 2.5 development series is undergoing impressing changes and improvements, and there is much ground to be gained in the productivity world through innovation and usability.

Just seen on Flickr - AbiWord running on a device based on OpenEmbedded. It seems that AbiWord’s size and efficiency are really strong points that others have discovered as well.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/koenkooi/403544298/in/photostream/
(Yes, I’ll work on getting the build working again - I’m not sure what the deal is but rest assured it will be fixed soon.)

and I chime in, thanks to Technorati..

http://pandionknight.wordpress.com/2007/01/17/open-document-format/

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1407263 - Apparently someone was having some difficulties installing AbiWord… Not sure why they didn’t just try the apt-get to start with, but we’ll see…

I have a nice backlog of links to go through sometime here, so keep your eyes peeled for additional articles soon! If anyone wants to be an assistant editor, please do email me and we’ll discuss it!

“Mad Props” (and by that I mean unconditional love and support) for Marc “Uwog” Maurer for maintaining our exciting up-to-date version in the Fedora Extras repository in this post… Some congrats as well on the slick speed and the RSVG import plugin. http://www.thecodergeek.com/blog/2006/09/11/i-should-have-done-this-long-ago/ GNOME Office is a pretty slick suite! Oh, and the Portable AbiWord edition also gets some love as well.

[EDIT: Link is now restored, thanks Peter for re-writing that article!]

AbiWord saves the day for this blogger! I think it’s probably a consensus among the developers that our import/export support is one of our prouder accomplishments to date, and that includes making things work even when the input (such as in this case) is not necessarily entirely sane. This post by one of the libwpd developers (libwpd is the library used by AbiWord to help import WordPerfect documents) is another sign in this direction: Depending on your version of libwpd (2.4.6 for Windows will have it for sure at least), you may have better WordPerfect file loading support than WordPerfect itself!

I think that’s pretty spiffy!

Yes, it’s true - Pango rendering in CVS HEAD is coming along to the point where we’ve gotten some positive feedback on its functioning, as well as a reference to some areas for improvement. Hopefully we can get some additional details on those issues so 2.6 has the best complex script support of the open-source word processors! http://vee-r.blogspot.com/2006/09/abiword-thai-text.html

Yep, some clever folks have worked out how to get the nicely-portable (in several ways!) AbiWord running on the GP2X handheld device! The blog entry is here.

Way to go, creative computer folks of the world!

As you hopefully know, AbiWord features a state-of-the-art Equation Editor based on MathML and LaTeX. We actually use a language very similar to but not identical to AMSLaTeX called itex, and these differences sometimes cause problems. There is also little documentation on itex, and most LaTeX documentation is written with users of the entire LaTeX package in mind, rather than users embedding equations in their document. I’ve collected here a few links to sources of material on itex/LaTeX that should prove useful. Note that AbiWord now features the latest version of itex which improves AMSLaTeX compatibility, so some of these pages might be a little outdated.
http://mcelrath.org/Notes/ITeXLaTeXDifferences
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/itex2MMLcommands.html
http://pear.math.pitt.edu/mathzilla/itex2mmlItex.html - Official web site of itex
http://www.agu.org/symbols.html - LaTeX symbols, most of these should work (file bugs if they don’t)