AbiWord: Multi-Platform Word Processor
Submitted by todd on Sat, 2007-10-13 21:36
AbiWord 2.4.6 is a multi-platform Open Source word processor. I recall using it for a few months on a notebook running Microsoft Windows several years ago. I tried out an early version (1.0 beta release I believe) of OpenOffice.org and have not revisited AbiWord since then.
It's interesting that AbiWord is available for Windows and Mac OS X (as well as Linux) while the OpenOffice.org project still can't figure out how to build a native Mac OS X version yet (even though the NeoOffice Project has a solution for them ready-to-go).
There are two problems with
There are two problems with Abiword 2.4.6 that will make it unusable for many Mac users.
First, because of a conflict with Rosetta (Abiword is a PPC app), the graphics in the toolbar on Intel Macs are dithered to the point of being unusable. I don't mean that they're simply unattractive; I mean that you literally cannot see what the buttons are supposed to represent.
Second, it has very poor font handling. It therefore has bizarre spacing on the screen, frequently running fonts together (You'll definitely see the problem if you type a word like Illinois).
I would vastly prefer to use Abiword over the much more bloated and slow OpenOffice and NeoOffice, but I've very regrettably found Abiword to be absolutely unusable on my Intel Mac.
Thanks for the heads up on
Thanks for the heads up on the issues for using Abiword on a Mac OS X Intel box.