AbiWord 2.2 for Mac OS X

[Clinton MacDonald]

Friends:

The word processor AbiWord is now available for Mac OS X in version 2.2:

<http://www.abisource.com/release-notes/2.2.1.phtml>
<http://www.abisource.com/download/>
<http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/04/1755214&from=rss>

Give this open source alternative to Microsoft Word a try. Here are some 
of my thoughts:

I played with AbiWord 2.2 for Mac OS X for a few minutes after 
downloading. The interface seems clean and uncluttered, though not 100% 
Aqua (the menu bars have a remnant of pinstriping, the interface widgets 
and rulers are a little too "dark-gray-on-light-gray"). Nevertheless, I 
prefer it to the Windows 98-ish, non-Aqua interface of OpenOffice.org 
(shudder -- soooo ugly). The icon is a dignified 3D "A" in a stylized 
gold bubble (I sorta miss the cute cartoon ant of previous versions :-) 
), and it starts up quickly.

You have to type in the ".abw" suffix when saving files; there is no 
option to include it by default. I prefer to set paragraphs at "Exactly 
14 pt" rather than "Single spaced," which did not previously work 
correctly in a beta version of AbiWord. Saving a file as ".rtf," then 
opening it in Microsoft Word revealed that paragraph spacing is not 
translated correctly (perhaps because of my "Exactly..." defaults). Oh, 
and I did manage to crash AbiWord by clicking a font setting in the 
Formatting palette.

Overall, AbiWord shows great promise. It seems fast and can save -- 
though imperfectly -- in RTF, the lingua franca of word processing 
interchange formats. I wish it inherited a little more of Mac OS X's 
Aqua look, but that is probably a bit much to ask of a cross-platform 
application. I wish that, instead of using its own format, AbiWord had 
chosen to support one of the proposed open standard formats for word 
processing documents like the XML-based standard that OpenOffice.org 
uses (OO.o/Star Office is not one of the choices in the Save dialog). 
Also, one of my ongoing needs is for a word processor to have support 
for one of the bibliography programs such as EndNote. Does anyone know 
if AbiWord has support for something like EndNote in the Open Source 
World? Until AbiWord or something else has this support, I will have to 
stick to Microsoft Weird.

Give AbiWord a try yourself, and let us know what you think!

Best wishes,
Clint

-- 
Dr. Clinton C. MacDonald | <mailto:clint DOT macdonald AT sbcglobal DOT net>