Nice commercial but pretty well meaningless
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| caitlyn Jul 10, 2012 10:24 AM EDT |
Quoting:AbiWord is one of the most important parts of the GNOME Office package That's probably because GNOME Office only has three parts (AbiWord, Gnumeric and Dia) and never became a real, fully functional office suite. Quoting:I will not focus on the stability of the application (although it crashed only once during testing). If there is a problem it will be cheerfully ignored. A supposedly mature and stable word processor still crashes? Really? Quoting:Unfortunately, the most important thing for every open-source word processor in this corporate driven world, is interoperability. I tested opening doc and docx files and everything worked as expected. Yes, AbiWord can read these documents correctly. Quoting:Everything worked as expected and in the same way I was used to from LibreOffice. One of the problems with LibreOffice is that your .docx documents look like a dog's breakfast after editing. It's great to know AbiWord equaled that performance... I think. Quoting:AbiWord is able to read and write all industry standard document types,Sure it is... if you don't care about formatting or fonts or page breaks or little details like that. What about all the features LO has and AbiWord doesn't have? Something else to cheerfully ignore, or so it seems. Quoting:AbiWord supports languages like Hebrew and Arabic as well. Did you actually use either of those languages. If not, how about Farsi or Azeri or Yiddish? Yes, AbiWord officially supports RTL languages but it doesn't do it terribly well. If you need to mix RTL and LTR languages in the same document it's, well... interesting. Quoting:Many come pre-installed and you can find more on the Plugin Matrix! This is unique to AbiWord, exactly, how? Why does this warrant an exclamation point? Why should I be excited? Quoting:I am sure that there will be people that will write comments saying “AbiWord can’t do this, or that” but I didn’t find anything to be sincere (except for some small details). Like PowerPoint presentations or anything similar, perhaps? Clearly people who use such things are insincere and overly focused on small details. Quoting:If you are not doing something special that is found on LibreOffice only, I definitely suggest that you should give AbiWord a try!AbiWord is a stand-alone word processor. LibreOffice is a full fledged office suite. Clearly anything that isn't word processing is "something special." Isn't that special? This is beyond drivel. |
| albinard Jul 10, 2012 12:21 PM EDT |
Article or not, Caitlyn, it looks like you're as fond of Abiword as I am. |
| skelband Jul 10, 2012 12:29 PM EDT |
> If you need to mix RTL and LTR languages in the same document it's, well... interesting. I had to do a project many years ago to handle the mixing of "western" languages with Hebrew and Arabic. The ligatures in Arabic were particularly interesting from a programming perspective. One of the "funnest" projects I ever did at the time. |
| caitlyn Jul 10, 2012 12:33 PM EDT |
Quoting:it looks like you're as fond of Abiword as I am.I actually don't dislike AbiWord. I just find it very limited. I do use it when I'm writing on the netbook, then cut and paste the results into a real word processor (usually LO Writer) to finish and format whatever I wrote. {Edit:} I copy and paste because AbiWord does not save to other formats well. It certainly is possible to write a fair review of AbiWord and come up with a fairly positive conclusion, something to the effect that it works well within its limitations. Calling it a drop in replacement for LibreOffice, not just LibreOffice Writer, and heaping endless praise with exclamation marks is not a review. It's a sad joke. |
| gus3 Jul 10, 2012 6:18 PM EDT |
Put simply: My latest experience with AbiWord didn't impress any better than did my first experience with same, thirteen years ago. |
| gary_newell Jul 10, 2012 7:08 PM EDT |
Abiword is ok if you want to type a letter quickly and print it out or email it. It is a bit like the word processing package that came with Microsoft Works in that it has a few working functions but has nothing on LibreOffice. I have been developing the school website and I do it on the train to and from work each day. I have Bodhi on my netbook and part of the task is to copy and paste some of the text and images from the school handbook which is a large word document. Yes Abiword can open the file and yes it is possible to do what I need but the amount of times Abiword lost my place in the document on overlaid images in the wrong place was incredible and painful. In the end I exported the document to HTML and copied and pasted the text that way. With regards to your comment Skelband about Arabic languages. I used to work on accountancy software called Sun Financials and it is a multilingual system. (This was back in the 90s and unicode wasn't really as advanced as it is now). One of the faults in the system was with the term "Chart of Accounts" which appeared in the chinese system as chart of accounts but replace the word accounts with a picture of a horse. Somehow the method we were using to calculate double bytes was failing. Oddly enough I had to fix these faults without having any clue about the Chinese language and so I would sit with one of the Chinese people who were there to localise the system and keep asking "Is it right now?". I think Abiword would probably be last on the list of choices when writing documents well behind LibreOffice, OpenOffice and Google Docs. |
| caitlyn Jul 10, 2012 7:51 PM EDT |
Quoting:Abiword is ok if you want to type a letter quickly and print it out or email it. It is a bit like the word processing package that came with Microsoft Works in that it has a few working functions but has nothing on LibreOffice.That sums it up nicely. Quoting: I think Abiword would probably be last on the list of choices when writing documents well behind LibreOffice, OpenOffice and Google Docs.Add Calligra Suite and Lotus Symphony to that list as well. The main advantage of AbiWord is that it's small, simple and lightweight, making it ideal for simple tasks and/or older hardware where interoperability with other systems really isn't needed. With that sort of a use profile it does rather well. My point wasn't to bash AbiWord, but rather to show how ludicrous this poor excuse for an article/review is. |
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