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!

• Five stars in a random blog’s review, sounds good to me! - http://tech-ramblings.blogspot.com/2006/01/abiword.html
• A switcher from OOo finds our speed pleasantly surprising… http://popsdownunder.blogspot.com/2006/07/i-recant-on-open-office.html
• Someone else with good taste in blog templates likes AbiWord, this time on Win XP dual-booting on a Mac, I wonder if they know that AbiWord runs on Mac OS X as well. Someone will have to let them know, maybe me a bit later… - http://www.ruralsme.com/blog/?p=4

• One happy user won back by ODT import/export - http://emacsen.livejournal.com/102590.html
• One mildly-disgruntled user with some ODT bugs that belong in the Bugzilla - http://buranen.info/?p=7
• A happy user digging the efficiency of GNOME Office - http://www.yollotl.net/~beto/diary/2006/01/abiword-gnumeric.html
• A Slackware user lamenting the loss of AbiWord due to the poorly-named libgnomeprint library - http://willysr.blogspot.com/2006/04/kde-352-is-out-for-slackware.html
• Happy user uses AbiWord for DocBook support, I let them know about Sum1’s upcoming patches - http://automaciej.blogspot.com/2006/04/tools-for-documentation-writing.html
• If you can read Spanish, you’ll smile when you read this - http://goodbikes.blogspot.com/2006/06/abiword-244241-un-super-wordmicrosoft.html
• Really small AbiWord is OpenEmbedded AbiWord! - http://www.xora.org.uk/wordpress/?p=32
• Successful conversions to Linux frequently involve AbiWord, and Fedora is a mighty fine choice especially since it always has the latest AbiWord - http://www.cobolhacker.com/?p=408
• Wonder if that article is in an archive somewhere, a user mentions a review of AbiWord in Brazilian PC World mag that seems to be unavailable - http://tuxrecife.blogspot.com/2005/09/abiword-na-pc-world-brasileira.html
• Hey, we can do Table of Contents and hyperlinks! A plug is always nice, regardless… - http://joecoolshotfreeware.blogspot.com/2006/03/abiword-free-word-processor.html
• LinkGrammar R, they mention AbiWord and our custom Link Grammar but I haven’t heard much from them. A post to the mailing list never hurts. - http://vee-r.blogspot.com/2006/06/linkgrammar4r-002-release.html

There, with the completion of this post I have officially gone through the last 100 AbiWord-mentioning blog posts according to Google BlogSearch.

Ran across a blog post expressing some dismay at a dataloss bug that produced unopenable .abw files. If I’m not mistaken, this probably was the one where some text, when placed in a table, did not correctly order the tags or escape something. I’m nearly certain this was fixed already in 2.4.4, but oh well… In order to promote rational, calm responses to similar messages, and at the risk of granting google juice to unproductive negativity, the post can be found here: http://ben.creationsnetwork.org/2006/04/13/abiword-wishing-it-were-so-much-more/

[EDIT: I hear that this bug is actually fixed in 2.4.5, rather than 2.4.4 - that’s what we get for waiting too long on this bug fix release Thanks, sum1, for memorizing Bugzilla!]

On a more positive note, we got name dropped in an OpenOffice blog (I noticed its affiliation only after I replied ), in the course of a post promoting OpenOffice’s PDF output support. Not one to be outdone by sitting still, I posted a comment mentioning the PDF output support on all supported platforms. Take that, implied lack of competition! http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/07/when_you_presen.html

(Mini-note along with that name drop - we’ve been getting a fair bit of collateral promotion thanks to Writely - here’s another blog that mentions AbiWord in the same post as Writely. The author didn’t mention the AbiCollab technology under development - I corrected that through a comment! It makes me smile to see this: “Abiword I love.” http://www.deepcallstodeep.sonafide.com/index.php/2006/04/24/writely )
In case you haven’t noticed, the paragraphs here are reversed from the title order. That means that next up we have switcher recommendation! Yup, we were mentioned on something between a blog and a standard homepage as a recommended program for a switcher from Windows to Linux, over OpenOffice. Fellow GNOME Office application Gnumeric also got the star treatment (though only we got the screenshot). If I had seen a comment area, I would have chimed in that not only is AbiWord a great app for switchers, you can use it right away on Windows and Mac OS X as well! http://parkology.org/past/applications-for-switchers-to-linux

In the field of “things to look into”, this blog post pointed out something called Docvert, which I hadn’t run across previously. It seems like a pretty commonly-requested web document conversion service, this time specializing in producing ODT files, which AbiWord certainly can do. The blog post mentions AbiWord support, and the download page requires either AbiWord or OO.o, as well as the PHP scripts available. Would be interesting to see how it uses AbiWord - I wonder if it uses the spiffy (apparently, never used it myself ) AbiCommand plugin, or simple command line conversion… It would be great if people who do things like this would let us know and give us their feedback, it’s the open source (or free software, no flamewars please) way. Check it at http://digitizationblog.interoperating.info/?p=309 and http://holloway.co.nz/docvert/index.html

I got these blog articles from the Google Blogsearch, something that only was made known to me a little while ago. Apparently this blog shows up there too, woohoo! There are many more posts that name-drop AbiWord than what I am including in these summaries - these are simply the more noteworthy ones, or ones I felt like commenting on. Check out the blogsearch for the rest!

One general note before I end this (surprisingly long) entry - I was pleasantly surprised to see the variety of languages in the blogosphere talking about AbiWord and new releases. We have amazing translations (and are always accepting new contributions), and complex script support is on its way on Linux (and already here on Windows), and I knew this already, but it’s still fulfilling to see how many languages I can and can’t read are talking about a word processor, a project, and a community I believe in.

Keep the spirit, ants!