[ILUG] word processors

[Alan Horkan]

> > (* i am really sick of Abiword being compared to Wordpad).

Sorry i was not suggesting you did, i was just saying that i hear a lot of
criticism of Abiword, the worst and most annoying of which is comparisons
to Wordpad.

Your original mail smelled like the old "Why bother with 2 Linux desktops"
arguement designed to start a flamewar, although i guess you did not
intend it that way.

> anything about wordpad. I did say that the standard for windoze is the
> .doc file format.

Standard are good but there are so many to choose from.  I wont bore you
with a discusion on defacto standards versus actual standards there is
plenty of that on slashdot.

> 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.

Efforts are being made to interoperate with each other.

Kword, Abiword and OpenOffice.org all use different varieties of XML.
Abiword XML was designed to be small do what was needed at the time, where
as OpenOffice.org XML is designed to do just about everything.  Kword is
almost a Desktop Publishing Program.  They all had different goals and
motivations, and until OpenOffice.org came along there was nothing much
looking like a standard, and it is huge, it just about manages to please
everybody.  Abiword will need to still retain its native file format even
when it has good support for OpenOffice.org

organisation, management and motivation of any project is hard.  i
particularly like the "herding cats" analogy.

> 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).

I firmly agree that a common file format is an important idea, but i wish
some one else would do the necessary work.  (seriously)

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

Again please help out.

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

> Abiword and kword are best and fastest (full) word processors available

Abiword does not do tables, but will by version 1.2

> 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

I am not familiar enough with OpenOffice to discuss file format support
but there is no way that OpenOffice currently runs on as many Operating
Systems as Abiword.
Windows, various Linux (x86 and PPC), BeOS (needs a maintainer), QNX,
XDarwin (Mac OS X using an Xserver), will compile on Solaris, AIX, *BSD.
http://abisource.com/download/index.phtml?all=1
There is also a native Cocoa Mac OS X version in active development but.

Later
Alan