AbiWord Community Outreach Project

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.)

“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

More quickies, in multimedia form this time. Enjoy!

• I have a hard time telling from this post whether or not this person knows that AbiWord runs on Windows, too… (and Mac OS X for that matter) http://www.malcolmr.com/?p=22
• This podcast take a while to get going (AbiWord segment starts 23:12 into it), but it does have some nice praise for AbiWord. http://www.linuxreality.com/podcast/episode-23-productivity-applications/ (from http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/06/07/19/1441253.shtml - I think I had to follow 3 links to find the original podcast the first time I ran across this…)
• This is our second mention on this blog - sounds like we have a happy user! I’m curious what makes TextEdit fit the same niche as AbiWord on Mac for this user, though… Glad all the Cocoa integration work was worthwhile, however! http://www.ruralsme.com/blog/2006/07/18/foss-for-macs/
• A compilation CD of free (but not necessarily Free as in speech) software, all in Spanish and/or Catala. I wonder why there is a separate 2.4.3 Catala version of AbiWord, in addition to 2.4.5 here - was some translation not sent upstream to us? http://www.cdlibre.org/consultar/catalogo/Ofimatica_Procesadores-de-texto.html (found through http://www.hispanew.org/html/?p=216 )
• I don’t understand anyone who would pirate MS Word, really, I don’t anymore. AbiWord is just that spiffy, and this blogger shares my (mildly biased) viewpoint. http://free-softwares-links.blogspot.com/2006/07/free-softwares.html
• Bloated is such an ugly word. I’m glad this person doesn’t think AbiWord is bloated. http://pauljcg.blogspot.com/2006/07/are-we-finally-seeing-shift-to-open.html
• AbiWord mentioned on a Myspace blog, now that’s kinda neat in a mass-marketing sort of way. I should make a profile for Abi the Ant. http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=92068870&blogID=147270585
• I think this is Portuguese - cute icon! This person likes the small size of the download. http://ideiasaovento.wordpress.com/2006/07/21/processador-de-texto-gratis/
• AbiWord and Gnumeric make a great office team - this user thinks that somebody should step up and make a PowerPoint replacement… I think it must be only us AbiWord geeks that make presentations in AbiWord… http://supermikenews.blogspot.com/2006/07/experiments-with-ubuntu-linux-adoption.html
• This person made the astute observations that first impressions can be deceiving. AbiWord doesn’t need to look complicated to be able to have complex abilities - usability is a big thing for us. http://www.lifewithubuntu.com/2006/07/openoffice-alternatives/ (Bonus - nice screenshot!)
• We got named “download of the day” here and they felt particularily happy about our slim size and low hardware demands. Not sure what the official word is, but I’ve certainly run (at least older) versions of AbiWord on less than 64 mb ram, though that’s probably a good amount to have as a minimum… http://www.byteswired.com/2006/07/27/download-of-the-day-abiword/

Sorry about the hiatus - I was unlinked for a while. I’m back in the saddle now, though!

Got a few ego-booster quickies here for ya! (Not sure why the Google Blog Search feed likes dredging up old repeat entries - I will probably have to change strategies to keep getting these entries out…)

• http://freewaremac.net/2006/abiword-openofficeorg-and-neoofficej/ - Mentioned as a useful bit of freeware (actually Free-ware ) for the Mac, and preferred over OpenOffice.org Writer… Can’t complain about that!
• http://automatthias.wordpress.com/2006/04/29/tools-for-documentation-writing/ - We get some “props” for our DocBook support, and it looks like this person even posted before 2.4.5 and many DocBook import/export enhancements courtesy of Sum1… Did I mention how awesome several of our Summer of Code students are?
• http://copywriter.typepad.com/copywriter/2006/04/new_version_of_.html - AbiWord works as a “writer’s word processor” for this user, and she recommends it to other writers! Sounds good to me!
• http://portableapps.com/news/2006-08-10_-_abiword_portable_2.4.5 - Version 2.4.5 of AbiWord Portable has been released! For those of you who are just tuning in, AbiWord Portable (formerly Portable AbiWord) is a re-packaging of the AbiWord software for Windows that can be run without installation from a USB key or now a CD. It comes with a launcher that runs AbiWord and then cleans up afterward, so you can run AbiWord without touching the configuration of a computer. A commenter on this news item remarked on the “new” “elegant” icon, which I just had to check out for myself. It’s the same one that has been used since 2.4 was released, at least in the original packaging of AbiWord. Apparently this must be its debut in the Portable Apps version…

Till next time, keep marching ants!

According to PC World Magazine, we’re one of the top 101 free services or downloads highlighted in their article here http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,124883;page,16;c,freeware/article.html. They know how it goes down: lightweight and full-featured all the way! (A link to the article text with AbiWord is here, and their data chart with another brief description is here.)

Back again!

• The small size and efficient operation of AbiWord were the big draw for this blogger… The plugins available are also a hit http://www.ghacks.net/2006/07/18/abiword-open-source-word-processing/
• A brief, but fairly positive and accurate review of AbiWord! -
  http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/43935/download_free_text_editing_software.html
• A ha! This blog has a good idea for what you can do with the money you save (and time, of course, but they didn’t mention that) using AbiWord instead of MS Office. They also mentioned OO.o, but that negates the bonus time thing… http://basictech.wordpress.com/2006/07/19/dont-wanna-spend-bucks-for-ms-office-try-openoffice-or-abiword-free/
• Horror of horrors, this Mac user is trying to uninstall AbiWord! Hopefully a friendly response from the dev community will have them rethink that decision. http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1319920
  

I love it when those I blog about show up and say hello!

Via email (thank you for your persistence - my email has been added to the About the Editors page…):

(hope one of these emails gets through — couldn’t find a contact link on cleardefinition.com)

> 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

Hi, I’m the guy who runs the Docvert project, and yeah I guess emailing the people whose work I build upon is a good idea The last time I did anything for Abiword was bug #1985 back in 2001.

The way Docvert builds upon Abiword is by getting it to do command-line conversions from MSWord to OpenDocument. It doesn’t dynamically build up the document using the AbiCommand plugin — instead it’s more about converting A to B.

After this conversion Docvert takes over and converts ODF to DocBook 5.0, and then HTML/XML*.

It can use OpenOffice.org for conversions, and from my perspective it’s about using Abiword and OpenOffice.org as mature conversion libraries. In this way users choose which conversion library is best. I’ve found that OpenOffice.org is quite good but it’s hard to keep going, what with the requirements for XVFB and all.

Anyway, thanks for telling people about the software. Cheers dude

* Going directly from OpenDocument to HTML would have been a pain in the arse… DocBook’s hierarchy of tags is easier to write unittests against (Eg, assert that all sections have titles) and it was much easier to deal with than a flat list of paragraphs and headings, a la ODF and HTML.

.Matthew Cruickshank
http://docvert.org

It might interest Matthew to know the recent improvements (nay, overhaul) of the Docbook import/export plugin courtesy of our Summer of Code student Sum1. It may also interest him to know that while AbiCommand does allow construction of docs, it can also be used for simple conversions (from Whatever to ODF, DocBook, or right to clean XHTML/CSS!) without spawning a new process each time. Google around for AbiCommand information - there should be some on Martin’s blog as well as in a nice “+site:abisource.com” Google search. I’ve never personally used AbiCommand, but I have heard of lots of folks who really like it. A bunch of patches just went in and will show up in 2.4.6 as well as the 2.5.0 development release.

Read and reply, ants!