AbiWord

AbiWord is a free word processing program under the GPL which runs on Linux, MacOS, Microsoft Windows, and other operating systems. AbiWord was originally a product of SourceGear[?] Corporation, but SourceGear has since turned the project over entirely to a team of volunteer developers.

The program features basic text formatting with style support but no table support at the moment in the stable branch. Table support is being written in the development branch. It has a wealth of import/export formats like RTF, HTML, Microsoft Word and LaTeX. The native file format is XML, so documents written with the program are a safe investment from the point of view of digital archiving.

Version 1.0 was released on 19 April, 2002. The latest stable release is 1.0.5; the latest development release is 1.9.0.

AbiWord contains a Wikipedia plugin to look up an encylopedic reference [1] (http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/December/0391). how to build: a short list of system requirements Building on Windows requires the easy-to-install cygwin. Informal tests (by smkatz) recommend at least 220MB of disk space for the install. In addition, it requires the following cygwin packages:

• bash
• sed
• uname

In the absence of additional build instructions, the abiword source file contains instructions in docs/build/build.txt.

External References

• http://www.abisource.com/
• Andrew Leonard: Abiword Up. (http://salon.com/tech/col/leon/2002/11/15/abiword/index) Salon.com, Nov 15 2002. History of the project and comparison with closed source development.