[besson3c]

Anybody here using Abiword? Looks like a nice native open source OS X alternative to MS Office. OpenOffice/NeoOffice seems similar to Mozilla in being bloated and chalk full of features while Abiword seems more like Firefox.

Opens and saves Word files too.


Any success stories or other testimonies?


You can download the disk image here:

AbiWord Downloads

[AndrewEWilson]

I looked at AbiWord because I wanted something that would handle simple keyboard commands such as Ctrl-T to swap a pair of letters (available in virtually every app EXCEPT MS Word). It does that, as it should for a Mac centric app.

However, it wouldn't handle the graphic at the top of my letterhead.

Its simple little things like this that either make or break an app for each person, so for me it went the way of all the others.

I would still like a good Mac based text processor without all of the bloat.

Andrew

[techtrucker]

I like AbiWord, use it some of the time. Trouble with a lot of the MS Office alternatives is compatibility. No matter how hard they try, compatibility is never 100 percent, at least in my experience. So whenever I think I have to share the doc with someone else I relent and use Word or Excel. But I'd rather not have to.

AbiWord does seem nice and lean. I also use Mariner Calc whenever I can.

Andrew, what happened with the graphic you mentioned?

[brettcamp]

What can AbiWord do that TextEdit can't?