AbiWord Wiki

	AbiWord wiki
Category Business Office Suites & Tools

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AbiWord

AbiWord screenshot
Developed by	The AbiWord Team
Initial release	December 1, 1998 (1998-12-01)
Latest release	2.6.8 / 2009-3-18; 258 days ago
Written in	C++
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Word processor
License	GNU General Public License
Website	www.abisource.com

AbiWord is a free software word processor. The name "AbiWord" (pronounced "Abby Word") is derived from the root of the Spanish word "abierto", meaning "open". It runs on Linux, Mac OS X (PowerPC), Microsoft Windows, ReactOS, BeOS (unsupported), AmigaOS 4.0 (through its Cygnix X11 engine), and other operating systems. AbiWord was originally started by SourceGear Corporation as the first component of AbiSuite, as part of a plan to create a full Office Suite that would be Free Software. However, SourceGear gradually moved on to other business interests, and now the AbiWord project is run by a team of volunteer developers. AbiWord is part of GNOME Office, a collection of office applications with some degree of integration.

1 Features
2 See also
3 References

[edit] Features

AbiWord supports the basic word processing features provided by Microsoft Wordpad such as lists, indents and character formats. AbiWord also supports table, styles, page header and footer, footnotes, template, multiple views, page column and spell checking. Although it is not as feature rich as Microsoft Word, it still features spell checking. ^[1] The Presentation view of AbiWord, which displays document in full screen, is another special feature not often found in word processors. Abiword does not have rich presentation features such as text frame, multiple way to anchor image, page style, border styles for paragraph, in-document image editing like changing contrast, font work and drawing, like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org Writer have. However, it is a faster word processing software, and its system requirements are not very high.

[edit] Interface

AbiWord has a similar user interface to classic versions (pre-Office 2007) of Microsoft Word, which is intended to ease migration for new users. Although there are differences, the AbiWord developers aim to embrace and extend this de facto standard in business. The interface is intended to follow user interface guidelines for each respective platform.

[edit] File formats

AbiWord is packaged with several import/export filters, including HTML, Microsoft Word (DOC), Office Open XML (DOCX)^[2]^[3], OpenDocument (ODT) and Rich Text Format (RTF). LaTeX is supported for export only. Plug-in filters are available to deal with many other formats, notably WordPerfect documents. The native file format, .abw, uses XML, so as to mitigate vendor lock-in concerns with respect to interoperability and also digital archiving.