Re: [Fsfe-uk] AbiWord

[Chris Croughton]

Re: Abiword

> 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 haven't used the Gentoo one yet (it was still building when I left for
work), but I've downloaded the Windows version at tried it.  It has a
certain amount of support for MSWord format.  I suspect that for simple
documents (letters with no headers or footers, tables or other advanced
features) it's fine, but import of headers and footers is somewhat
broken and export of advanced features isn't there.  OOo is much better
at that, even in the older 1.0 version.  You're right that it supports
/far/ more formats than their web page indicates (I don't know how
complete the others are).

As far as I could tell it neither imports nor exports the OOo OASIS
format.

It is also much more 'lightweight' than OOo for downloading and excution
resources.  I'm definitely going to look at it for preparing my CV, for
instance.

Thanks, John, for bringing it to my attention...

Chris C