Subject: AbiWord vs. WordPad
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Mar 24 2000 - 00:29:00 CST
The latest slur I've heard about AbiWord goes something like this:
"oh, it's just WordPad, not a real word processor"
Admittedly, we've still got plenty of features to write, but I'd like to
encourage anyone with some spare time to help put that absurd myth to rest
once and for all.
Say you ignore our three greatest advantages:
1. we run everywhere, not just Windows
2. we're Open Source, not proprietary
3. we're extensible and getting better every day, not frozen in time
Even so, there's simply no comparison between the two products.
things WordPad can't do at all...
---------------------------------
- read Word95, Word97, or Word2000 documents
- spell check with squiggles and personal dictionary
- page view
- sections and columns
- page and line breaks
- page margins
- paragraph spacing
- line spacing
- justified text
- paragraph and character styles
- superscript / subscript
- zoom
- word count
- change keybindings
- change localizations
- exporters: UTF8, LaTeX, HTML
they try, we do better...
-------------------------
- undo (one step vs. infinite undo with coalescing)
- ruler
- paragraph dialog (no comparison whatsoever)
- tabs dialog (as soon as it's done)
where we're still behind...
----------------------------
- page setup
- turn off status bar and toolbars
- cheesy bullet hack
- handle Windows Write (.wri) documents
To be fair, though, there's one place where WordPad will stay "ahead" for a
while yet -- they've got a whole bunch of menu items to allow you to insert
random OLE objects in your ultra-boring documents. Big whoop. How many
people do you know who've paid the big bucks for *other* Windows software to
create those OLE objects? And how many of them use WordPad? Right.
I'd rather use a real word processor than be stuck with a crippled toy.
Paul,
feisty guy
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Fri Mar 24 2000 - 00:23:28 CST