Re: [Fsfe-uk] AbiWord

[Chris Croughton]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 07:26:10AM +0000, John Seago wrote:

> To Chris Croughton, I extend my apologies and accept his. to those of you 
> who have patiently explained the technical points of saving attachments I 
> extend my grateful thanks.

Thank you, and yours accepted in turn.

> I, on the one occasion that I used an attachment, have found that I failed 
> to save it in the right format. Strangely enough I have discovered that 
> AbiWord will save in 26 formats, including RTF, backwardly compatible RTF, 
> and Microsoft formats, including Word .docs. These 26 formats seem to be 
> 10 more than OpenOffice can save in, I have yet to check if those that 
> AbiWord uses, cover those that are present in Open Office, which would 
> seem to make AbiWord, as a stand alone word processor, a useful tool for 
> those who do not want or need the OpenOffice Suite of applications.

Indeed, and thanks for the information, their web site is /very/ out of
date it seems (it says that they don't support saving in MS Word format,
and only mentions a few other formats).  If they've improved it that
much it sounds worth investigating, OpenOffice is very big and is
definitely overkill for what many people want (reading MSWord documents,
writing documentation, etc.), AbiWord seems a lot more lightweight.
I've started an emerge on my Gentoo system (source build, I wouldn't
dare do that with OOo, it would take forever).

> I will write to the e-Government Unit, to discover which formats they can 
> open, should I ever use and attachment again. 

That is information they should have on their web page, if it isn't
there or can't be found easily I'd suggest contacting their webmaster or
e-liason person.

Unfortunately even RTF and PDF are proprietary formats, but they are
pretty universally usable (RTF has formatting issues sometimes).  There
still isn't a generally accepted 'rich' format (including formatting
information) which is free (in the sense of freedom, neither RTF nor PDF
require payment)...

Chris C