Replying to Abiword

Abiword is a great tool but comes with its limitations... i've never really used the application that much but I would prefer LibreOffice Writer for more document work

Top NotchAbiword

I am very impressed for a lack about Abiword. Its like a dream come true to put aside microsoft word. It seemed like and endless monopoly gone wrong microsoft word-processing. Well, I think that abiword has a future ahead. Maybe they will be the giants of tomorrow. Just look at the endless possibilities; just look at Goggle. They made it to the top with their billion$. As for performance they seem to be top notch.

-reply by Richrd Ibarra

 

A lot of people can't get office XP because it's too expensive. I use Office 97 because I found an old licence, else I would also use Abiword. Why can't we use the most expensive things if they do very professional work ? Because we don't have money.
So, if free things are good enought, why not ?
If free things are almost perfect, let's cope with it.
And of course, if rich people can spend their money, they shall continue. Unfortunately, only rich people can compare costly things to free things.

Honestly Just use Microsoft Word and programs BUILT for COMPUTERS, why bother with FREE word processors like Abiword when Word offers premium world wide facilities, programs and guarantee based tests to make sure their programs are not bad.

Its pretty sad if you cant get Office XP profesional, why bother even typing up good documents.

Recently, I was disappointed with OpenOffice, so I was motivated for spending a couple of hours testing abiword.
The look and feel is nice, I like it. Several things work correctly. Abiword during my test was able to open a Microsoft Word document. The http links are visible and can be opened. I was able to write down a simple document, and open it using Microsoft word ; only the background colour was lost.
Some things do not really work. When reading a Microsoft Word document having a table of contents, the words « table of contents » appear but the table is not there. The tables are correctly displayed, but the incorporated images disappear.
When I tried to open a 60 pages pdf document, it started converting the document and after waiting one night the document was still not opened.
Abiword is not able to write down in pdf format, whereas OpenOffice can (it does it badly but it does).
This means that, if you don’t want to use paying things, and if like me you don’t like the too big and too slow OpenOffice suite, you do it that way :
1) You use AbiWord (free) fro creating your document.
2) You use :
- Acrobat reader (free) for reading the pdf files
- Microsoft Word viewer (free) for reading the Microsoft Word files
- Microsoft Powerpoint viewer (free) for viewing the pdf files.

I did use abiword a long time ago, perhaps a year ago and got really pissed off with it because it kept messing up the bullets or something... and also it's compatibility with Office was terrible... I don't remember exactly. I got rid of it and installed OpenOffice which also has compatibility problems with Office, but for some reason, I found better to use.

OpenOffice Writer Vs AbiWord... the biggest problem, is they aren't producing their competitors extensions types (swx, abi) for one or the other (maybe this has changed now?).

I've used AbiWord and OpenOffice Writer, and depending on what you use them for, would be why you picked one over the other, I use OpenOffice Writer as I use a lot more OpenOffice applications and thought there really was no reason to need more than one word processing program, so I decided to keep the OpenOffice suite.


Cheers,


MC

AbiWord is cool , but OpenOffice 2.X + will be alot more feature rich. No doubt at this time MSOffice is very feature rich. I wonder when would AbiPresenttaion and AbiSpreadSheet come and make the whole suite.

Frankly, most people would just like to stick with good old Microsoft Word because looking around you, do you see any Journalists or Writers around here? Well maybe just a few teensy bit who just come here - type a few posts - get bored then go. Most Windows XP computers come with Microsoft Works as well which functions as a general purpose tool much like Powerpoint, Word, and Exel put together. Right till now I've never seen anyone who designs websites in word processors. Maybe the occasional Publisher but nothing worse than that. (PLEASE notepad ISN'T a word processor!!) So right now, my projects-Works, my essays-Word, my coding-notepad. No biggie, although AbiWord does look very multi-functionable and broad features.