[ILUG] word processors

[nils Olofsson]

On Fri, 2002-05-17 at 15:27, Alan Horkan wrote:
> 
> 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).
> 
I was not trying to compare abiword to wordpad ,in no was did i ever say
anything about wordpad. I did say that the standard for windoze is the
.doc file format.
> 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.
I was trying to say was that wouldn't it be better to pick one format
and just use that,e.g. XML or something similar.
> 
> 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).
It does not get away from the fact that a common file format would be
better.if every app used a common file format then if a new feature was
added ever app would in theory support that feature,but might not
implement it.where as if abiword or kword add a new feature the importer
code would have to be changed to import that new feature!
correct me if i am wrong.(which i probably am).
> 
> 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

Abiword and kword are best and fastest (full) word processors available
natively I.E GTk and QT,but OpenOffice is the best supported in terms of
number of different OS's that it will run on, and the number
file(formats) that it supports.

Regards,
Nils
 
-- 
A penguin a day keeps the fatal exception away!