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<excerpt><fontfamily><param>Verdana</param><color><param>8080,0000,8080</param><smaller>I'm
amazed. You win prizes and AbiWord misses some features like those of
Microsoft Word. Features like languages support and some editing features
and Print Preview. As a disabled person I'm not hooked.
</smaller></color></fontfamily>
<fontfamily><param>Verdana</param><color><param>8080,0000,8080</param><smaller>Steve
Dolesch
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Steve,
Microsoft Word has been under development for nearly 20 years. Microsoft
currently rakes in almost $10 billion a year for copies of Office (which
includes Word), a fraction of which may get used for development of
additional features. Microsoft Word runs best on Windows, pretty well on
Macintosh, and doesn't run at all on Linux, BeOS, FreeBSD, or anywhere
else.
AbiWord is a little over a year old, and is being developed by a small
and
growing collection of people around the world so that it can run on any
modern OS whose programmers want it to, including Windows, Linux, BeOS,
FreeBSD, and others. Last time I checked, nowhere near $10 billion
dollars
has been invested in this product. Far from it.
If it had, I promise that you'd have absolutely *nothing* to complain
about.
:-)
For a product that's at 0.7.6, I'm very proud of what we've accomplished
so
far. I believe that the awards we've won are in part due to where people
expect us to be when version 1.0 is ready to be released. Even then, we
will not have *every* feature in the current version of Word. That's OK.
What we already have is very useful for many people. Version 2.0 will be
even better for people who need more advanced features.
Please continue to let us know what features are most important to you,
because we eventually hope everyone will choose to use AbiWord because
they
*want* to, not because they have to.
For example, we're currently focused on features other than Print
Preview,
because our zoomable page layout view should allow most of the same
functionality. I'm one of the strongest advocates for this argument
among
AbiWord developers, so please let me know what else Print Preview allows
that we don't currently support.
Thanks,
Paul