I had discovered this last week, right after the 0.5.0 tarball.
The problem is that some of these documents reference fonts
with capitalization different from the way the fonts are loaded
from disk. The fonts are _supposed_ to be case-insensitive
internally, but weren't. They are now, in CVS. Documents saved
with AbiWord will have the case squashed out of them already, so
many of these documents will work, but since the docs/ contents
were from old versions, some of them triggered this bug.
We really need to release a new tarball. :) Since right after
the 0.5.0 release, I added a whole bunch of dialogs which should
catch lots of font problems. I've also cleaned up a few make
problems (added NetBSD, added a catch for unknown), we have more
accurate requirements checking, and fixed a few bugs like the
font problem. We also have a start at an RTF importer, and
Word97 is coming along.
-- Shaw Terwilliger