AbiWord v2.5.0 Release Notes

AbiWord v2.5.0 Released

The AbiWord team is very proud to announce AbiWord v2.5.0, the first snapshot of the development that will lead to AbiWord 2.6.

This snapshot allows interested developers, testers and users a sneak preview into the future of AbiWord.New features of this release include (amongst others):

A new Pango based renderer for Unix platforms, improving support for languages such as Thai and Arabic

Cross platform libgsf integration, allowing the user to open files on remote shares (the last part holds for the Unix platform for now)

Cross platform Glib integration, meaning less custom AbiWord specific code to maintain

Support for the Bonobo component framework has been deprecated (Unix platforms)

Improved the build system to be more standards conformant (for example, "make dist" and "make distcheck" now work)

Experimental AbiWord GTK+ widget, with accompanying Python bindings

Various toolbar improvements, most notably the improvements to make them work better on small screens (Unix platform)

A massive amount of work on all of our popular import and export filters

A new experimental collaboration plugin (only available on Unix for now)

A new GNOME Office integration plugin, replacing the old GNOME Office Charting plugin (Unix platforms)

Improved command line handling, allowing input from standard input, and output to be directed to standard output (examples here).

Improved printing from the command line, deprecating our old custom postscript driver

Lots of updates to our translations

Various Drag & Drop and Clipboard handling improvements

Improved modularisations for resource constrained devices, such as optional printing and spelling support

Improved support for running AbiWord in non-UI mode (sometimes also referred to as "server" mode, as offered by the AbiCommand plugin); most notably the requirement for a (fake) X server has been removed.

AbiWord v2.5.0 is parallel installable with AbiWord v2.4 so users can try it out without disturbing their stable AbiWord 2.4 version (make sure you specify an installation directory seperate from your AbiWord 2.4 installation on Windows systems!). We are very much interested in any bug you may find. Please report these to http://bugzilla.abisource.com/. Binaries will hopefully show up within a few days.

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!

The AbiWord Development Team