AbiWord v2.2.4 Released

menu->Tools->set language->choose English(UK)

Save it as a template then use it forever more.

If you have an existing document do Edit->Select All then Set Language-> choose English(UK)

Fors setting up templates see:

http://www.abisource.com/help/en-US/howto/howtonormaltemplate.html

Available through the "help" menu.

Firstly are you using a Unix build?

If so, just install the aspell module for British english for your disto and Abiword will pick it up.

Aspell and Myspell are much better spell checking libraries than ispell.

We provide a truckload of different ispell hashs file for Widnows. You can find them on the abiword download page.

For Unix we leave it up the users distro to package a decent collection of spell checking files.

Martin

We would love to fully support this. Help would be greatly appreciated.

We have made quite some progress to support the OOo format which is the basis of the OASIS format so interested developers would not need to start from scratch.

Also since the importer is a plugin, the build/test time is measured in seconds. ie Make a change, type "make install", fire up abiword and you can test it a few seconds after saving you changes.

Martin

We do have an import and export plugin for OpenOffice (OASIS is quite similar (and equally insane)). We currently have no plans to make it our default file format.

I do that all the time. I get some information from webpages and reformat them so I can print it in less pages or with a nicer layout.
Abiword is my preferred word processor and it really shines in this release (I had problems with displaying colors and ghost letters), but having that feature would rock.
But I'm not sure if the problem is in a more capable GNOME clipboard or better interoperability though...

Actually i do this with Epiphany and Ximian-OpenOffice-1.3.8 all the time.
But i understand your problem.
We should have a clipboard that handles different types of different media.

Still in its infancy, criawips http://www.nongnu.org/criawips/downloads.html

Just checked out the web page, I'll download it and take it for a spin.

A future inclusion for GNOME office perhaps?

Also out of curiosity, what does criawips mean?

As far as features go, a PDF exporter would be great, 2.4 perhaps!

There are problems in stable gnome-print so the exported PDFs are broken sometimes. This is fixed in the upcoming GNOME release.

Cool.

In the Gnome port the printer system in gnome (2.8/2.10?) handles printing to PDF and PS files. This would do what you want, so directly trying to support it would be duplicating work.

Can I take it that there is a gnomified release of Abiword or have I misunderstood.

Cheers.

Yes, there is a gnomified 'release' of AbiWord, and it has been there for the past few years now ....

That being the case, perhaps I already have it without being aware of the fact.

How do I tell whether I have the Gnomified Abiword, and if not where do I get it?

Cheers.

If you are running Linux, then you are running the Gnome version of Abiword. A large part of the Abiword code is written platform independant and the rest of the code is written for each OS. Abi makes use of Gnome where ever possible, like menus, printing, dialogs etc.

Most of the functionality that was Gnome specific has been moved into the GTK toolkit so it automatically available.

This is not entirely true. The GTK-only port does NOT have libgnomeprint support for example. You are running the GNOME port if you have a File->Print Preview menu item.

The 2.4 release is slated for summer this year. When we release it depends on how many extra features we decide to cram into it.

Right now we have support in CVS HEAD for these major new features:

MathML (display only right now)
Grammar checking
Pango-layout for Indic and other complex scripts (well this still needs a lot of work but is likely to be ready for summer.)

We have lots of other projects simmering away. It helps to know what users really need so we know which ones to push.

One feature I'm missing is a way to export a document to a clean, no CSS style/font/whatever encumbered XHTML to use with my own CSS stylesheets. It should be easy to accomplish (basically a stripped down version of the current export software) and would really be helpful for me. Should I file an enhancement request?

rehdon

We have want you want already. When you export to HTML, a dialog which allows you to tailor the HTML is presented. There is an option which allows you to choose to not embed the CSS style sheet.

Just unselect the check box and you get non-CSS XHTML.

Enjoy :-)

Cheers

Martin

Should I file an enhancement request?

Of course! How would we know otherwise?
Alternatively you might consider putting up a bounty. Features in AbiWord have also been implemented in exchange for amazon wishlist "presents".

What I really meant was: does it make sense for other people to have such a filter implemented? I surely don't expect the Abi team to work to my exclusive benefit ;)

rehdon

Yes, it makes sense to me. The occasional time I've exported a file to XHTML, I've then gone through and cleaned it out so I could easily do what I want with it.

There is an option when exporting to XHTML not to embed the CSS stylesheet, though it does still leave some "extra" markup in the file in order to help the exported file resemble the original as much as possible. Still, it's fairly clean. It would probably only take a couple minutes using global search/replace to remove the extra stuff.

Bugs 2289 and 4869 seem to be calling for something similar.

You won't get that question answered here probably.
And yes, there is a chance that requests are implemented even if only one person asked for it.

- Rob

What sorts of features are you looking for that you find lacking? I'm sure the developers (a number of whom will be reading this thread) would like a bit more information.

Can't say I use word processors all that much, but when I do Abiword does pretty much all I need it to do. You say it's lacking too many features, but the only thing I can think of is PDF export, and there is already a plug-in that does that, just that it isn't (wasn't?) all that stable.

I love abiword's simplicity. For example compare the settings dialogs in Abiword and OOo-2. OpenOffice.org has too many settings. Are all those settings really necessary?

If we could get a good presentation app (criawips: dead or alive?) and some database app, that allows us to quickly throw off queries and generate reports (mergeant?), then I could ditch OOo-2..

It is not as easy as that. PDF printers are based on ps2pdf or similar stuff, but a good pdf exporter can handle hyperlinks, bookmarks and more features.

Jespa