ATTN: AbiWord 2.5.0 released

The AbiWord team is very proud to announce AbiWord v2.5.0, the first
snapshot of the development that will lead to AbiWord 2.6.

This snapshot allows interested developers, testers and users a sneak
preview into the future of AbiWord.

New features of this release include (amongst others):

  * A new Pango based renderer for Unix platforms, improving support for
    languages such as Thai and Arabic
  * Cross platform libgsf integration, allowing the user to open files
    on remote shares (the last part holds for the Unix platform for now)
  * Cross platform Glib integration, meaning less custom AbiWord
    specific code to maintain
  * Support for the Bonobo component framework has been deprecated (Unix
    platforms)
  * Improved the build system to be more standards conformant (for
    example, "make dist" and "make distcheck" now work)
  * Experimental AbiWord GTK+ widget, with accompanying Python bindings
  * Various toolbar improvements, most notably the improvements to make
    them work better on small screens (Unix platform)
  * A massive amount of work on all of our popular import and export
    filters
  * A new experimental collaboration plugin (only available on Unix for
    now)
  * A new GNOME Office integration plugin, replacing the old GNOME
    Office Charting plugin (Unix platforms)
  * Improved command line handling, allowing input from standard input,
    and output to be directed to standard output (examples here).
  * Improved printing from the command line, deprecating our old custom
    postscript driver
  * Lots of updates to our translations
  * Various Drag & Drop and Clipboard handling improvements
  * Improved modularisations for resource constrained devices, such as
    optional printing and spelling support
  * Improved support for running AbiWord in non-UI mode (sometimes also
    referred to as "server" mode, as offered by the AbiCommand plugin);
    most notably the requirement for a (fake) X server has been removed.

AbiWord v2.5.0 is parallel installable with AbiWord v2.4 so users can
try it out without disturbing their stable AbiWord 2.4 version (make
sure you specify an installation directory seperate from your AbiWord
2.4 installation on Windows systems!). We are very much interested in
any bug you may find. Please report these to
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/. Binaries will hopefully show up within a
few days.

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!

   The AbiWord Development Team
Received on Mon Jan 15 00:00:00 2007