The world desprately needs a good GPL'd word processor. AbiWord is already
a much cooler experiance than the bloated, proprietary WordPerfect.
Only problem with AbiWord so far is that debugging is really getting in
the way, it gets into a habit of spewing debug messages onto the console,
each of which must be answered. Would a 'yes | AbiWord' fix that (haven't
tried)?
I plan to try this soon on my PowerPC (Linux 2.1.x). This is the machine
that I ultimately want to do my word processing on. Before, since every
full-featured word processor was binary only, there was no way I could do
my homework in anything other than vim or emacs.
I've posted to several mailing lists about how much better AbiWord is
going to be than WP, I feel sorry for all thee people who use WP or Applix
because they think there is nothing better.
I would advise potential contributors to avoid wasting their time on a
Motif or QT port, Motif and QT not only look inferior to Gtk but have
licensing problems (even with Qt, the GPL is not as good as the GPL, even
though it is "free"). Gtk run on almost all platforms that Motif or Qt
will. I don't see a reason why someone would prefer to use AbiWord with
one of those toolkits. Adding functionality should be the highest priority
for the moment, much of which is needed for version 1.0. Gnome integration
might also be nice.
Keep it up, I'm eager to download future snapshots and try them! I've been
dreaming of a GPL'd word processor that would run on my hardware and it
looks like it is finally becoming a reality.
Aaron Lehmann