Re: Does abiword work on Mac?

On Wed, 28 Jun 2006 10:38:39 +0000, lchaput@istar.ca said:
> Hello All, does abiword work on Mac?

As a user, I'll offer my experience:

Yes, it works, but...

Ok, so the version of AbiWord for the Mac has *really* come a long way,
even since I started using it less than a year ago, and it was quite
decent even then. The developers have done a fantastic job. That said,
it seems to have some issues. I'm not sure how widespread they are, but
I've had issues with font spacing that have made it a challenge to use.
Sometimes words had apparent spaces where there were none, while other
letters were shmooshed together. It made the output virtually
unreadable, and occured both onscreen and when printed (see
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8384 if you're curious).
It seemed to do really start doing this for me with version 2.4.0. The
font spacing changes when the text is highlighted, but it's still not
right.

Now I've just tried it again and it looks like it's working better
today. I'm on 2.4.4, though I have had that problem with that version in
the past as well. So I guess, as Alan said, "your mileage may vary".
This is a known issue, and from what I understand the Mac developers are
looking at switching to a different font rendering scheme or something
like that which will probably eliminate this issue, but that hasn't been
completed yet.

Good things about the Mac version: It integrates *beautifully* with OS
X. It prints using the standard print dialog, with all the wonderful
options it brings. It looks pretty. It has the menu at the top like
every other Mac program. It installs and uninstalls like any other Mac
program. It's quite speedy. In short, it just fits in (as opposed to
OpenOffice.org, which works but sticks out like a sore thumb and I think
takes longer to load than my iBook takes to boot).

If you're more accustomed to Linux, there's also the option of
installing the GNOME version using either Fink or DarwinPorts and
running it under X11. The Fink binary version is typically out of date
(v2.0) though the source version is newer but takes time to compile, and
the DarwinPorts version takes forever to compile and is a pain in the
buttocks to update (I'm not a fan of DarwinPorts at all), so it's not
perfect but it works. If you don't understand what I'm talking about,
just forget I even wrote this paragraph. :-)

Overall, I've been quite happy with the Mac version, but having used
Linux for the last few years (go Debian!) I sometimes just use one of
those versions to get the feel I'm accustomed to.

andy

-- 
Andy Korvemaker
http://andyland.ca
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