[ILUG] word processors

[Alan Horkan]

the original post smells like a troll to me* but I will try to take it at
face value (and i am on the list digest so this post may be a little
redundant in places, please CC me if you want a prompt reply)
(* i am really sick of Abiword being compared to Wordpad).

Google
site:abisource.com is the easiest way to search the abiword mailinglist
archives, file format and star office might turn up something relevant.
The abiword bugzilla http://bugzilla.abisource.com has requests for file
format support.

Go to OpenOffice.org and take a look at the specification for the
OpenOffice.org / StarOffice file format.  It is huge, and as far as i can
tell the file format supports just about everything imaginable.

By comparison the abiword file format is tiny, only supporting the
features that Abiword can actually use and display.

Efforts are being made in Abiword to make impoters and exporters for both
Kword and OpenOffice.org but it depends entirely on what people are
interested in doing.  Support in Abiword for OpenOffice is at the moment
marginally better than plaintext support.
There are also efforts by the developers to talk to each other and
interoperate where possible and sensible, but these things take time and
effort.  None of the Abiword developers are paid*, they all do it
completely voluntarily (* although some do have very sympathetic
employers) and all this work takes time.  It would be substantially easier
for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org to implement Abiword support than it is for
Abiword to implement OpenOffice support, i dont know if anyone has even
requested Abiword suppport (yet).

Please do volunteer your time (or sponsor a developer), and make help make
abiword/kword/openoffice.org (or LyX or whatever you use) better.

If you are willing to write XSLT to convert between the various formats it
would be very much appreciated.  I was investigating the possibility of
using XSLT to display abiword documents in any XML capable browser
withouth the need for a plugin but i dont have the time or the expertise
in XSLT (yet).  As it is Mozilla will take an abiword document and display
it as plain text with line breaks, even a quick Stylesheet (CSS) would
help Mozilla do a better job of displaying native Abiword documents. (but
really you should just use Abiword to Export as HTML or XHTML).

Incidentally efforts are being made to make Gnome Office more coherent
http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/1020959162/index_html
Abiword recently got a very suprising favorable reveiw from MSNBC
http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/1021403359/index_html

I may as well mention now that it is quite easy to get irish spellchecking
in Abiword, just download the ispell dictionary from the Abiword
sourceforge page and put it in the dictionary folder (alternatively or
as well you could use the smaller slower Gaelspell dictionary).  Select the text and
go to tools language to mark the selected text to be spellchecked in
Irish.  (The irish localisation of the user interface is crap though(i got
bored and let it bitrot)).
I only spent a few minutes trying to figure it out but I would like to
know know how i could spell check Irish in OpenOffice.org if anyone knows
offhand.

Programming is usually harder than it looks
"The Devil is in the details".

Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Abiword ~Stakeholder


Date: 16 May 2002 20:13:22 +0000
From: Mark Finlay <linuxexpert at eircom.net>
To: David Neary <dneary at wanadoo.fr>
Cc: ilug at linux.ie
Subject: Re: [ILUG] word processors


> I agree wholeheartedly. I think the standardisation should be
> around .sxw, which is half the size of a .doc for the equivalent
> document, and a third the size of the old .sdw. I think at least
> that kword and abiword should support that format, and eventually
> use it as their default. I think it'll be great when we get some
> kind of consolidation in the unix/linux world. And on document
> formats is a good place to start.

the various project's are trying their best - and it was hoped that the
staroffice format could be made a standard - but because of various
problems caused by sun the abiword team and others weren't able to use
the format.

--
Mark Finlay
"sisob's linux eXPerience"
http://sisob.dyndns.org
Registered Linux User: #243436