Re: Word processors

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu>]

At Jean's request,  I tried out abi-word.

At the moment, almost all features are unimplemented. 

Basically , it's a text editor that allows you to choose different fonts
and choose right/left/center alignment. 

On the positive side, the fonts rendering doesn't suck too much and the UI
looks nice. The package doesn't look that ugly even if it doesn't do much.

It exports postscript OK, so I guess it should print just fine.

I haven't made it crash, but then, I haven't done very much with it.

At this early stage of developement, it seems unlikely that one would do
much with it. 

It looks like kword is beating it on features. Kword already allows one to
do a lot formatting wise ( super/subscripots, headers, frames , embed
other koffice components. ) 

I think they might have
some kind of word filter, though I haven't checked carefully.

IMHO, koffice probably has more potential, but maybe abi is more reliable
right now. The only thing that doesn't look good about Abi is you click on
something and get a dialogue saying "not implemented". They don't want to
release binaries until 0.7 and I respect their judgement.

Personally, I wouldn't author  critical documents with either.
But both have some potential.

Meanwhile, we are kind of in the doldrums, as the only free word
processors still alive are the newborns. Oh well, maybe we just recommend
Word perfect and/or Star for now.

Cheers,

-- Donovan