Before you begin

I am going to illustrate the collaboration process using the Abicollab collaboration service. This service is free, you only need to sign up, check your email, and then verify your account. You do not have to use Abiword to take advantage of Abicollab. But since Abiword has the feature built in, it only makes sense to take advantage of this collaboration server via Abiword. if you opt to do this with a different word processor you will have to manually upload and download the files. The ability to manually upload and download files is handy when your fellow collaborators are not using Abiword.

You will also notice, in your Abicollab account, you can add groups and friends. Take advantage of this because it will make the collaboration process even easier.

Once you have signed up for the service, you are ready to start collaborating. So let’s see just how this is done.

Connecting Abiword to Abicollab

Figure 1

When you open up Abiword click on Collaborate > Accounts. When this new window opens you will want to click the Add button to open the Add Account window (see Figure 1).  Remember that Abicollab account you created? This is where you add the credentials for it. Select the AbiCollab.net Collaboration Service from the dropdown list. Once you do that, enter your credentials, and finally select if you want to connect at startup.

After you have completed that you are ready to start collaborating.

Collaboration

Figure 2

This is actually quite simple. If you have yet to upload a document then fire up Abiword and start writing. When you are finished click Collaborate > Share Document. In the new window you can select which buddies or groups you want to share the document with and then click OK (see Figure 2). This will upload your file to your AbiCollab account. Anyone you have selected to collaborate on this document will be able to collaborate on that document.

You can also open shared documents. To do this click Collaboration > Open Shared Document and, from the resulting window, select the document you want to open for editing. This will automatically download the shared document and open it with Abiword.

The only issue I have seen with this system is there is no way to determine if a file is already opened by a user. This could cause some serious issues when one person makes an edit prior to another making a different edit on a previously saved file. AbiCollab needs to come up with some form of locking mecahanism before this is of any real value to serious collaborative users.

Final thoughts

Although not perfect, Abiwords ability to collaborate makes it a very unique tool in the world of word processors. I like where this is going, and once AbiCollab works out some means to lock files I will use it in earnest.

JDarkRoom is a free alternative which uses Java, allowing it to be used under Linux, OS X and Windows. JDarkRoom even operates on eeePCs, providing a non-resource hogging word processor.

JDarkRoom is customisable. Should you dislike the Matrix-like green-on-black colour scheme, through pressing F6 you can choose any colours you want (providing you know their RGB values) and if you dislike the somewhat monotonous font, that can also be changed. Margins and font sizes can also be changed through the preference menu at F6.

JDarkRoom definitely utilises a minimalist approach to word processing, I cannot even spot an italicise option, but is nonetheless an efficient one.

I do have a few minor complaints with JDarkRoom. When saving a file, you are presented with your operating system’s default box for saving files, which breaks the minimalist GUI. I do not see why you can not just specify a path to which to save it. JDarkRoom also takes a couple of seconds to quit, which is once again an annoyance.

JDarkRoom is well worth a shot and if like me, you are prone to procrastinate and lose concentration, it may be for you. Perhaps if I used it, I would write more posts here!

The difficult part begins to combine and make use of that feedback without loosing control. If you do that in Microsoft Word or any other desktop text editor you will most likely wind up with multiple documents opened in tabs or windows trying desperately to align them comfortably.

Text Flow is an online collaboration software using Adobe Flash and Adobe Air that allows the user to compare and display multiple versions of a document online. With Text Flow it is just a matter of dragging and dropping the documents into the interface to visualize all comments and changes made by other authors who worked with the document.

Check out the Text Flow online demo to see how the system works.

There are obviously other ways to handle the problem of receiving feedback from multiple colleagues. If time is not a issue you could make the colleagues work on one document only that gets send to each of them successively.

Other services like Google Docs offer basic collaboration features but they are not always allowed to use depending on the company you work for.

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.

First of all, yes, it does look awesome. It uses the clever contrast of gray and white, with pastel colors in the titles and so on to give you a beautiful look that you will most likely praise, but I doubt that looks is what we need with a good word processor.

The first sentence you are greeted with in the intro document is “The first real web based word processor”. I quickly raised my eyebrows here, I had no idea that I was using non-existent online word processing in the form of Google Docs until now. While I appreciate hype, this is a bit too far to go I think. Join me in the quest to determine if Buzzword is really all it looks to be!

The underlying engine of Buzzword is of course flash. This is not a huge surprise, since we are talking about an Adobe product essentially. It’s also not a surprise that due to this, the word processor really does look very sleek. From fades, to the way the ruler can be pulled out, it’s all made perfectly, especially the menu, which is sort of like the ribbon in Office 2007. By the way, the menu is built up in a really logical way, with unobtrusive pop-up help, a joy to work with, really. Once everything is loaded, it is lightning quick though, but you do need to load each new document. For some older PC’s and lap tops, all the fancy animation may be a bit much.

Editing documents is super easy, very intuitive and overall full of great features that are not offered by Google Docs for example. You can easily insert a table here, endnotes, comments, links, headers, footers, special characters and so on. One of the greatest features here is the ability to assign comments to highlighted areas. It works very much the same way as it does in Office, and you can turn them on and off in an instant.

The app has a great status bar, showing you some relevant info about your document. To the left it shows you the author of the document, and the button to enable you to share it with others. To the right you have a tab for viewing editing history, a very useful way to track changes made by many people. Next to that are the two most useful indicators in my opinion, word count, and the somewhat unique flag count. This counts all words that are underlined by the software for some reason or the other. This essentially means spelling-error count, and if you are working in a team it is great to check your own, or other peoples’ work. There is also a zoom feature which works in real time beautifully, and an offline/online indicator.

It would be nice to have offline features, perhaps using Google Gears, but no luck yet.Buzzword is still work in progress, so I am sure they will implement this later on. Until then you can save your documents right onto your desktop from the Save menu.

Overall this is a great piece of software. When I sat down to write this I was skeptical, I was trying it as I went along. My initial view was that this has got to be only eye candy, it can’t look this good and actually be usable, but I was wrong. I was desperately trying to find something wrong apart from it may be slow on older systems and it has no offline mode, but I really can’t. Yes, it could have more advanced features, but it still equals and beats most competitors. An awesome product, worth trying and using, I am switching right now.

The new functions add several new possibilities to Open Office that users normally do manually. Among them are a word lookup tool using several dictionary websites, a backup function (email, remote, multi form), Google Translate, a map lookup, two writers templates, a word game and several others.

To install the plugin you need to click on Tools > Extension Manager in Open Office and click on the Add button in the My Extensions screen. Then simply navigate to the downloaded plugin and select it.

Read More:

Writers Tools
via Lifehacker

You may then use those phrases by either right-clicking the system tray icon and selecting the phrase from the menu or by assigning hotkeys to folders or single phrases. The second method is of course a lot faster than the first. Phrase Express offers several other features that make it a great software. It can automatically expand abbreviations in some programs and append a signature with a random quote as well. The spell checker is another feature which unfortunately does not work in Firefox or Thunderbird.

You may disable the Capslock key to avoid pressing it unknowingly as well. I think that Phrase Express is very helpful if you write a lot regularly. I reply to about 20 emails per day plus numerous private messages on various forums and I was always looking for a program that would let me paste phrases that I always used. Guess what, Phrase Express saves me a lot of time everyday.