Subject: Re: Advogato Article on AbiWord
From: Larry Kollar (kollar@alltel.net)
Date: Sun Jul 23 2000 - 16:21:42 CDT
sam th wrote:
>Advogato (www.advogato.org) is running an article on "What's Wrong With
>AbiWord." The basic idea is that XP software is a bad idea, and also that
>C++ is evil. ...
I saw that article, and Caolan's well-considered response.
The article itself was flawed -- it stated flatly "cross-platform
software and C++ are bad" but failed to back that up with anything
of substance -- to the point of not being worth reading. In fact,
we wouldn't be discussing it if the author hadn't picked on AbiWord.
*IF* there's anything wrong with AbiWord right now, I would say it's
in the long-term vision. I'm not talking about 1.0 here; that seems
to be pretty well thought-out. Even though the challenging stuff is
out of the way and only the hard stuff is left, the coders are making
steady progress.
There are a few features that will be deferred by consensus until 1.0
is out, but that's not what I mean by "long-term vision" either. But
*what* do we want AbiWord to be? A full-on Word clone, or something
lighter and faster? In keeping with the "church secretary" goal, I
see AW falling into the lightweight category. Maybe a matrix will help
me explain:
Free software Commercial software
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Lightweight WP AbiWord, Kword *Works, Nisus Writer
Heavyweight WP Star Office[1] Word, Word Perfect
Technical LyX FrameMaker, Ventura, Interleaf
Page layout ??? PageMaker, InDesign, Quark
Before the flames start, let me say there's nothing wrong with a
lightweight word processor. It's ideal for short documents, creative
writing, letters/memos, and (of course) church bulletins[2]. You
start it, you type, you do some light formatting, you paste in a
picture or two; it stays the heck out of your way. No dancing paper
clip or any of that other nonsense.
Business documents (like proposals) are often more elaborate, but
the lightweights can still do the job. Sometimes I wonder where the
heavyweights fit in. Long technical documents are better suited for
FrameMaker or LyX, and page layout programs are for layout-intensive
stuff... so where do the heavy MS Word or StarOffice fit in? I guess
when you want/have to do more than one thing with the same program
(which only makes sense for commercial software). AbiWord doesn't
have to do it all to be a roaring success.
Thanks for bearing with me.
Larry
[1] Welcome, Sun! [I'm not sure if ApplixWord fits in here or not.]
[2] My wife uses PageMaker for church bulletins, but she uses
PageMaker to write letters too. Go figure.
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