Re: My final post

On Sun, 2005-11-06 at 19:18 +0100, sxxx@o2.pl wrote:
> Hi guys, this is my last posting here. I'll try to make this one as
> clear as I can by putting all the comments in separate points. But
> first, a word of explanation: My first post on this mailing list may
> indeed sound puerile, but I wrote it under the impression of
> OpenOffice Writer and it's great possibilities in comparison with
> Abiword, which I used to use. The post wasn't intended to be aggressive.
>
> 1. "If you really wanted to use AbiWord, our import and export is
> quite functional - it would not be impossible to do the majority of
> the work in AbiWord then export to RTF, the de-facto standard for WP
> document interchange, which OpenOffice.org should be able to read."
> - Ryan Pavlik
>
> You must admit that's not a very comfortable way, and makes Abiword
> dependent on the other word processors.

No it doesn't.
It means rtf is a good common format that you should export to if you
want other word processors to be able to read it.

> I'm sure everyone would
> rather like to do all the writing, formatting and printing in one
> single application, and then successfully export the file as, say,
> PDF. This is a great advantage of OOo Writer over Abiword.

AbiWord exports to PDF just fine for me on Linux - and it does on
Windows too if you install a FREE application that sets up what looks
like a printer to the OS and produces PDF output.

PDF output does not belong in a word processor, it belongs in the
printing subsystem. OO.o includes it - but that is bloat.

OS X and gnome-print both include printing to PDF. If you are using
Windows, it is a deficiency in your operating system - one that can be
solved by installing additional free software.

>
> 2. There's one bug in Abiword HTML export I can recall right now. No
> matter there are one or two consecutive line breaks in the original
> document, Abiword HTML export makes it two (or at least that's how
> it looks). I've noticed more bugs but can't remember now, so you
> will have to play with it yourselves.

If you want html output that renders decently, use an html editor.
Really.

>
> 3. Did you try to put a table into the header? In Abiword it doesn't
> seem to work right (the program leaves one empty line under the
> table). I needed this to make page counter aligned to the
> left/right, and chapter name to the center, cause this is probably
> the best way to do it.

I can't respond to that.
Have you looked at MikTeX? It's a really good TeX implementation for
windows that blows the sox off of anything else for typesetting needs.

>
> 4. Abiword runs very slow on larger documents. Also, it's not quite
> truth that it runs very fast on older machines (I know the example
> of Pentium 500 - the whole page blinks during the writing).

Works perfectly on my 700 MHz laptop.
Maybe its the Windows port?

>
> 5. It's not that i don't appreciate your work, guys. I'm sure you're
> all willing to constantly improve the program. But let's face it,
> the improvement goes way too slow and Abiword is left far behind by
> other word processors.

I disagree.
I don't want a word processor that is so bloated it takes ~ 12 hours to
compile on my workstation - AbiWord compiles in under 20 minutes on same
box.

Bloat makes for difficult maintenance and really weird bugs that can be
very difficult to track down. It took many months for them to figure out
why cut and paste didn't work in the ppc port of OpenOffice, for
example. Meanwhile cut and paste worked just fine in AbiWord.

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Received on Sun Nov 6 20:14:46 2005