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GNOME-Office 1.0 Released

GNOME Office
GNOME Office

The GNOME-Office team is proud to announce the immediate availability of GNOME-Office 1.0. GNOME-Office is a suite of Free Software productivity applications that seamlessly blend with the GNOME Desktop Environment. GNOME-Office includes the AbiWord-2.0 Word Processor, GNOME-DB-1.0 Database Interface and Gnumeric-1.2.0 Spreadsheet.AbiWord 2.0 aka "Mean Ant Blues"
AbiWord-2.0 is a cross-platform word processor that combines
state-of-the-art usability, powerful Word Processing features,
excellent interoperability with other Word Processors and many
unique plugins that can be used to extend the program as needed.
Among the new features in AbiWord-2.0 are: tables, footnotes,
endnotes, mail-merge, database connectivity, revision marks and
numerous server-side features such as command-line scripting. It
features superb MS Word import ability as well as perfect
import/export to Rich Text Format. Crowell Systems, suppliers of
software and services to the Medical Industry, have installed
AbiWord-2.0 on tens of thousands of seats.

Bill Crowell of Crowell Systems says,
"The speed, ease of use, and customizability of AbiWord made
upgrading our customers from Windows desktop to MfxLinux Desktop
a do-able task. AbiWord is directly invoked by our server
application for the users desktop and feeds the mail merge
fields from our Database. It's interface is easier to use than
Microsoft's mail merge, which consequentially eased our
customer's transition to the MfxLinux Desktop dramatically."

GNOME-DB 1.0
GNOME-DB provides a unified data access architecture to the
GNOME project. GNOME-DB provides a data-management API, offering
easy access to data from a large variety of data providers
including: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL Server, Sybase, Oracle,
Firebird, IBM DB2 and mSQL databases as well as ODBC data sources,
XBase, MS Access and SQLite files. The GNOME-DB application enables
AbiWord and Gnumeric to integrate text and data from any of these
databases into documents and spreadsheets.
Gnumeric 1.2.0 aka "Emb-Ext"
Gnumeric 1.2.0, GNOME's spreadsheet, is designed to be fast,
compatible, and easily extensible. The latest release provides a
comprehensive set of accurate analytics, including a solver, goal
seek, iterative expressions and 100% coverage of MS Excel (tm)
worksheet functions. There is also newly added support for
encrypted xls files, Applix 5, PlanPerfect, Quattro Pro, and
OpenOffice import.

Dr. B. D. McCullough, associate professor of Decision Sciences
at Drexel University and a noted authority on the accuracy of
statistical software says: "Persons who wish to use a spreadsheet
to perform statistical analyses, and who are concerned about the
accuracy of their results, are advised to use Gnumeric rather
than Excel."

Morris Pearl, Columbia University. Former-head of Fixed Income
Quantitative Research at UBS Warburg, says: "the many advantages
of using open source software such as Gnumeric are quickly
overtaking the one advantage of using Microsoft's proprietary
Excel software, namely interoperability with other users of
Excel."

Details

More information about AbiWord, GNOME-DB and Gnumeric can be found at the links below.
Abiword: http://www.abiword.com/papers/guadec4/
GNOME-DB: http://www.gnome-db.org/
Gnumeric: http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/gnumeric-1.2.0.html

Availability

AbiWord: http://www.abiword.com/download/ - AbiWord Mirror: http://abiword.snt.utwente.nl/download/
GNOME-DB: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libgda/1.0/
Gnumeric (Source): http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnumeric/1.2

Gnumeric (RPM Packages): http://www.gnome.org/~jody/packages

Screenshots

AbiWord Word Processor
Gnumeric Spreadsheet
GNOME-DB Database Interface

Re: GNOME-Office 1.0 Released

The Japanese localisation is a bit borken. Since I'm off to Japan to study the language in a couple of weeks, I'm planning to file lots of bugs against it.

To address the specific issues:

Most of the UI has been translated, but Abi2 seems to need launching with an explicit LANG=ja_JP abiword in order to get the translations, even if LANG is set in the global environment. (If you have a debug build, it also asserts lots on launching.)

I'm not sure about fonts, as I only have Kochi Mincho and Kochi Gothic on the system, and they both show up fine. If you point me at some other free ones, I'll play with them.

XIM/kinput2 is temperamental. Right-click on the document, select X Input Method from the Input Methods sub menu on the contextual menu, and then shift-space to start kinput2. This works at least a little bit. I managed to get 'Nihongo no waapuro' in kanji, hiragana, and katakana into Abi.

But, as uwog said, this aspect of Abi still needs a whole lot of loving, so if you can help with bug reports and testing, that would be great.

David Chart

dchart