Abiword: A Lean Word-processing Machine

Jack Wallen — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:26:27 +0000

I like my tools to be efficient. Part of efficiency is opening quickly, not sucking up all of my systems’ resources, and saving in various formats. When considering office needs one of the first tools that pops into my mind is word processing. Naturally the masses will first turn to either MS Office or OpenOffice. But there is another alternative that can do the job faster, easier, and without hogging up your system resources. That alternative? Abiword. In this article you will learn how to install and and run Abiword.

Abiword is considered part of the GNOME Office Suite, but does not require GNOME to be running to use. Abiword is also available for Microsoft Windows. Abiword is available for most distributions and can be installed by both traditional routes. The first, and easiest method, is to open up your Add/Remove Software application (such as Ubuntus’ Synaptic), do a search for Abiword. What should appear is a list of possible matches. The following are the packages you need to install.

abiword
abiword-help
abiword-plugin-mathview
abiword-plugin-grammer
abiword-common
libgtkmathviewOc2a

Select those and click Apply to begin the installation.

Once installed you will find the Abiword entry in your desktops’ Office sub-menu. If you are using a desktop such as Enlightenment you may have to click Ctrl-Left Mouse Button (to make the Maintenance menu entry appear) and click Regenerate Menus to make Abiword appear. Once the menus have regenerated Abiword should be found in the Other menu in the Office sub-menu entry.

When Abiword opens what you will find is an efficient, well thought-out word processor that has everything you need to create solid, professional documents. You will also find some nice additions that make your writing even easier. One such tool is the Wikipedia entry tool. With a word highlighted you click the Wiki Encyclopedia entry and it will open the Opera browser on the Wiki entry of the highlighted word. There is also a Collaborate tool that allows users to collaborate on documents through Jabber. Of course Cisco purchased Jabber so who knows if collaboration with Abiword is going to be possible. The good news is you can do collaboration with a direct TCP connection (we’ll go into this in my next article.)

Final Thoughts

I have used Abiword and in the past have thought it had a ways to go before it was production ready. Well, that time has come. Abiword is certainly worthy of being your word processor of choice.

Tags: abiword, Enlightenment, GNOME, Linux, office suite, Windows, word processing

AbiWord Open Source Word Processing

Martin — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 17:44:13 +0000

Are you looking for a free lightweight alternative to Microsoft Word and Open Office ? Are you sick of endless loading times and office suits that occupy hundreds of megabytes of space on your hard drive ? AbiWord might be worth a closer look if you answered those questions with yes. What´s so different about AbiWord that I would recommend it ? There are several reasons, first it is only about five megabytes in size which is a good prerequisite for a fast loading application.

AbiWord is open source and available on many platforms including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac Os, FreeBSD and others. The open source tool is able to read and write all important formats like Microsoft Word, Open Office, Word Perfect, Rich Text, web documents and more. This is ideal if you want to import files from different sources and work with them at. Plugins enhance the functionality tremendously, there are currently more than 50 free plugins and tools available as additional downloads from the AbiWord website.

Tags: abiword, freebsd, Open Source, plugins, text editor, Windows, word

gHacks technology news » abiword

Abiword: A Lean Word-processing Machine

Related posts

AbiWord Open Source Word Processing

Related posts