ATTN: AbiWord 2.6.0 Released!

AbiWord v2.6.0 Released

March 24, 2008

AbiWord 2.6 is a multi-platform word processor that combines
state-of-the-art usability, powerful features, and excellent
interoperability. Furthermore, it features a powerful framework for
supporting custom extensions. AbiWord 2.6 is the most stable and capable
AbiWord release ever. In addition to fixing hundreds of bugs reported by
our users, it contains several exciting new features.

This release includes the following changes (and more!):

* Greatly-improved support for languages like Thai and Arabic using a
new Pango based renderer (Unix platforms)
* We've included a new GNOME Office plugin that allows embedding
Gnumeric charts into your documents (Unix platforms)
* Ability to open files on remote shares, ie. samba, ftp or ssh shares
(Unix platforms)
* A new experimental collaboration plugin, allowing users to
collaboratively work on the same document in real-time. There are
currently 3 communication backends supported: an XMPP based one (only
available on Unix systems, and it could use some love), a pure TCP/IP
based one and one that integrates with the One Laptop Per Child Sugar
interface. Please note that we consider this collaboration feature
experimental, as it hasn't seen a lot of testing outside the One Laptop
Per Child deployments. Also, we are not sure yet that we won't need to
make slight protocol changes to accommodate some new features. This
means that the current version of the plugin might not be able to
communicate with future versions of the plugin. Finally, this feature is
not yet available on Windows. It will be available in v2.6.1 for that
platform.
* A massive amount of work on all of our popular import and export
filters, most notably the OpenDocument filter
* The addition of a new experimental OpenXML import filter
* Support for native Windows Vista menus
* Various drag & drop and clipboard handling improvements
* Allow dragging and dropping images in and out of AbiWord (Unix
platforms)
* Fast image previews in the Image dialog, even for huge images (Unix
platforms)
* Various toolbar improvements, most notably the improvements to make
them work better on small screens (Unix platforms)
* Lots of updates to our translations
* Lots of small fixes in our GTK+ frontend, such as fixing those pesky
tooltips that just wouldn't go away (Unix platforms)
* Automatic font substitution using fontconfig when a specific font is
not available (Unix platforms)
* Improved support for running AbiWord in non-UI mode (sometimes also
referred to as "server" mode, as offered by the AbiCommand plugin); most
notably AbiWord no longer requires an X server on Unix systems in non-UI
mode.
* Improved command line handling, allowing input from standard input,
and output to be directed to standard output.
* Improved printing from the command line, deprecating our previously
used custom postscript driver
* Improved modularisations for resource constrained devices, such as
optional printing and spelling support
* For application developers we've made available an experimental
AbiWord GTK+ widget; accompanying Python bindings will follow soon.
* For distributors we've improved the build system to be more standards
conformant (for example, "make dist" and "make distcheck" now work)
 
Note: The equation plugin on Windows systems is currently unavailable.
If you require equation support in your documents, then please continue
using AbiWord 2.4.6. Future AbiWord releases will include equation
support again on Windows systems.

Availability: http://www.abisource.com/download/.

More information: http://www.abisource.com/.

Getting involved: The AbiWord community is participating in Google's
Summer of Code 2008. Students can find more information on how to
participate can be found at http://code.google.com/soc/2008/. Sign up to
get paid to work on AbiWord this summer!

Enjoy!

   The AbiWord Development Team
Received on Mon Mar 31 00:41:07 2008