FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

AbiWord v2.1.1 Released

The AbiWord team is very proud to announce the release of AbiWord v2.1.1, the second snapshot of the development that will lead to AbiWord 2.2.

This snapshot allows interested developers, testers and users a sneak preview to see how AbiWord is advancing the State-of-the-Art in Word Processing.

New features of this release include (amongst others):

A detailed description of the new features follows below. The full ChangeLog can be found here.

AbiWord v2.1.1 is parallel installable with AbiWord-2.0 so users can try it out without disturbing their stable AbiWord-2.0 version. We're particularly interested to learn of bugs in Revision Marks. Please report these and other bugs you might find to http://bugzilla.abisource.com/.

While we encourage people to try out the new snapshot, please be aware that is a development snapshot and is not expected to be stable in any sort of way.

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

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

Enjoy!

   Abi the Ant and her intrepid hackers

New Features: A Detailed Description

MacOSX

We are particularly proud to demonstrate the first binary release of AbiWord as a native MacOSX application. This is due almost entirely to our great friend and exceptionally talented developer, Hubert Figuiere. We believe that OSX users will enjoy all the speed and integration Windows, Unix and QNX users have derived from AbiWord. Just a word of warning, this is a still an experimental release and will be much improved for the 2.2 release. Thanks Hub!

Table of Contents

Lots of Word Processesor have an automatic Table of Contents (ToC) generation feature, so why is AbiWord's implementation announced as advancing the State-of-the-Art? Because AbiWord is the first Word Processor to do it right! Our ToC updates live as you type in your document. It is also incredibly customizable. You can use the feature to produce tables of any collection of styles and make it look exactly how you want it to. You control it through a fully HIG-compliant (on Unix), non-modal dialog. Don't like a change you made? Just press undo and get it back to how it want. No need to close the dialog.

Text Folding

What is text folding and what does AbiWord do to advance the State-of-the-Art? Text folding is sometimes enabled in "Outline Mode" in other Word processors. However AbiWord does not make you go into a different mode of operation to enable this feature. Text folding hides the text between the headings of list elements. It allows you to see the structure of your document in broad brushstrokes. In AbiWord this is controlled through the "Bullets and Numbering" dialog. Select this and then click on the new "Text Folding" tab. Choose the level of text you want to hide and press "apply". Restore with by choosing "No Folding" or press undo.

Version History

AbiWord allows you to record all the changes that have been made to your document between editing sessions. You can roll-back changes to earlier documents. In addition you can compare two document of a common origin and merge the differences into one document with the differences recorded as revision marks. This is very useful in the process of collaboratively producing a document. Just send out copies of your document to your colleagues and automatically merge the changes back into your master copy.

Complex Languages

AbiWord now makes it possible to use plugins and native libraries to handle complex languages. The first implementation that is currently being worked on is for the Windows platform, which has the Uniscribe facility. We hope to have a Pango plugin for Linux in time for the 2.2 release but we could really use some help for this feature. Interested developers are encouraged, (even begged), to contact us to learn how they can help.