From: Marc Maurer (j.m.maurer_at_student.utwente.nl)
Date: Mon Mar 22 2004 - 19:07:52 EST
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The AbiWord team is very proud to announce the release of AbiWord
v2.1.1, the second snapshot of the development that will lead to AbiWord
2.2.
This snapshot allows interested developers, testers and users a sneak
preview to see how AbiWord is advancing the State-of-the-Art in Word
Processing.
New features of this release include (amongst others):
* Experimental native Apple-Macintosh OSX binary for testing purposes.
* Automatic Table of Contents generation.
* Text Folding (sometimes called 'Outlines').
* Version History and Rollback.
* New complex language support to allow platform targets to use
plugins to support complex languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Thai and
Indic languages.
* Merge Documents into Revision Marks.
* A Stylist Dialog.
* Single click Table Column selection.
* Many speed ups.
* Improved Revision marks.
* Improved MS Word import.
* Improved HTML export.
* Improved RTF Import/Export.
* Many, Many bugfixes.
A detailed description of the new features follows below. The full
ChangeLog can be found at
http://www.abisource.com/changelogs/2.1.1.phtml.
AbiWord v2.1.1 is parallel installable with AbiWord-2.0 so users can try
it out without disturbing their stable AbiWord-2.0 version. We're
particularly interested to learn of bugs in Revision Marks. Please
report these and other bugs you might find to
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/.
While we encourage people to try out the new snapshot, please be aware
that is a development snapshot and is not expected to be stable in any
sort of way.
Availability: http://www.abisource.com/download/development.phtml.
More information: http://www.abisource.com/.
Enjoy!
Abi the Ant and her intrepid hackers
New Features: A Detailed Description
MacOSX
We are particularly proud to demonstrate the first binary release of
AbiWord as a native MacOSX application. This is due almost entirely to
our great friend and exceptionally talented developer, Hubert Figuiere.
We believe that OSX users will enjoy all the speed and integration
Windows, Unix and QNX users have derived from AbiWord. Just a word of
warning, this is a still an experimental release and will be much
improved for the 2.2 release. Thanks Hub!
Table of Contents
Lots of Word Processesor have an automatic Table of Contents (ToC)
generation feature, so why is AbiWord's implementation announced as
advancing the State-of-the-Art? Because AbiWord is the first Word
Processor to do it right! Our ToC updates live as you type in your
document. It is also incredibly customizable. You can use the feature to
produce tables of any collection of styles and make it look exactly how
you want it to. You control it through a fully HIG-compliant (on Unix),
non-modal dialog. Don't like a change you made? Just press undo and get
it back to how it want. No need to close the dialog.
Text Folding
What is text folding and what does AbiWord do to advance the
State-of-the-Art? Text folding is sometimes enabled in "Outline Mode" in
other Word processors. However AbiWord does not make you go into a
different mode of operation to enable this feature. Text folding hides
the text between the headings of list elements. It allows you to see the
structure of your document in broad brushstrokes. In AbiWord this is
controlled through the "Bullets and Numbering" dialog. Select this and
then click on the new "Text Folding" tab. Choose the level of text you
want to hide and press "apply". Restore with by choosing "No Folding" or
press undo.
Version History
AbiWord allows you to record all the changes that have been made to your
document between editing sessions. You can roll-back changes to earlier
documents. In addition you can compare two document of a common origin
and merge the differences into one document with the differences
recorded as revision marks. This is very useful in the process of
collaboratively producing a document. Just send out copies of your
document to your colleagues and automatically merge the changes back
into your master copy.
Complex Languages
AbiWord now makes it possible to use plugins and native libraries to
handle complex languages. The first implementation that is currently
being worked on is for the Windows platform, which has the Uniscribe
facility. We hope to have a Pango plugin for Linux in time for the 2.2
release but we could really use some help for this feature. Interested
developers are encouraged, (even begged), to contact us to learn how
they can help.
-- Marc Maurer <j.m.maurer_at_student.utwente.nl>
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