An Alternative Word Processor

by Eric Foster-Johnson

April 25, 2002 —

AbiWord is the little word processor that could. Designed to look and
act much like Microsoft Word, AbiWord has always been a relatively
small program that installs and runs easily.

As a word processor, AbiWord has continuously improved for years, which
were sorely needed since so many features remained incomplete. Now,
with a 1.0 release nearing, AbiWord includes most of the features you'd
need in a word processor.

Before Sun made an open source version of their StarOffice desktop
suite (OpenOffice), AbiWord was considered the word processor for the
GNOME desktop, much like Gnumeric is the spreadsheet program for GNOME.
With Sun releasing OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org) and endorsing
the GNOME desktop, the AbiWord's position was left in doubt.

Luckily, none of these doubts seem to have impacted the AbiWord's
developers. Since I last looked, AbiWord has improved quite a lot. Most
of the improvements finish off previously-unfinished features, but one
new feature really stands out: The ability to save in Microsoft
Word's .doc format. Previously, AbiWord could load most MS Word
documents, but could only save to the textual RTF format. You can now
save to MS Word format as well. AbiWord still does not support all MS
Word features, but it supports a number of document formats, include
DocBook XML.

Another benefit of AbiWord is its support for many operating systems,
including Linux, Windows, and MacOS X. Download AbiWord from
http://www.abiword.org/download. This site will try to determine your
operating system and then present you the download for that OS. If you
are, for example, downloading the Linux version from a Windows system,
you need to go to http://www.abiword.org/download/index.phtml?all=1 to
see all the downloads. On this page, you will see downloads for
Windows, Intel and PowerPC Linux, MacOS X, FreeBSD and UNIX source
versions. Versions are also available for BeOS and QNX.

A number of interesting plug-ins are available at
http://www.abiword.org/download/plugins.phtml.

If you don't want the overhead of a huge suite like OpenOffice, or if
you prefer a word processor that acts like the familiar MS Word,
AbiWord is well worth a look.

ITworld