Everything is optional if you have a compiler -- it's open source. :-)
> it's one of the features I could never stand in
>MS Word 98. Lets not become another Microsoft Word. My teacher hands out
>papers with incorrect capitalization (e.g. the first word on every line in
>a list of words..), and she says "Blame it on Bill Gates". There are
>plenty of things that AbiWord needs before bloat. Off hand, I can think of
>mail merge, advanced formatting, print previewing, grammer checking,
>stationary, and macros. Those are all more important to me than
>interactive spell checking, which i find annoying and unhelpful.
Don't panic. Be aware that opinions on these kinds of issues vary widely.
Interactive spell checking is considered by many to be the only useful new
feature of Word 97. Yes, some people find it annoying, but those people
can just turn it off. (Seriously speaking, there currently is no option to
turn it off, but there will be when we get our Options dialog in place.
:-) )
I agree that mail merge is critical, I would have a very different opinion
about a grammar checker. I personally consider grammar checkers to be
useless, and I regard them as pure bloat. Like I said, opinions differ.
It looks like we agree that automatic capitalization *does* fall squarely
in the bloat category. :-)
Regardless of your opinion, we've worked and planned very carefully to
ensure that AbiWord does *not* suffer from bloat. We're choosing a focused
feature set which we believe will appeal to a wide audience. You may not
agree with every single feature we're including, but I'll offer the opinion
that it's a bit early to cry "bloat" about a functional word processor
which still fits on a floppy disk.
Eric W. Sink, Software Craftsman
eric@abisource.com