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AbiWord 2.3.5 "You make me fly so high" released!

Submitted by msevior on Sun, 2005-08-21 07:37. AbiWord
AbiWord

The AbiWord team is happy to announce AbiWord v2.3.5 (aka AbiWord 2.4 beta 2) for your stress-testing pleasure. This release is virtually identical to what will become AbiWord 2.4, but still contains some bugs that might the speed up the greenhouse effect or cause your house to fall over.

Several new features are starting to become available for normal users willing to test them out. We will address two of them in some more detail.

Equation input and rendering

This release is the first that has builtin support for creating equations using the itex language (a dialect of LaTeX) alongside the already existing MathML support. Inserting nicely rendered equations is as simple as typing E=mc^2 now!

A more complex example could be:

\int{ \frac{x^3+1}{x^2+1} }dx = \frac{1}{2}x^2 - \frac{1}{2}ln(x^2+1) + arctan(x) + c

Which is rendered by AbiWord as:


Equation rendered by AbiWord

While standard symbol fonts can be used to render equations, the best results are achieved when the Computer Modern fonts are installed.

Note that equation input and rendering are still considered to be experimental. We welcome your feedback on this new feature. Unfortunately we could not get equation input and rendering ready for this release on the Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OSX platforms.

Grammar checking

A feature that is available for the first time on the Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OSX platforms is grammar checking for the English language. Sentences that are considered to use bad grammar constructs are marked by green squiggles. For color blind people their shape differs from the squiggles used for marking incorrect spelling. An example is shown in the figure below:


Spellchecking and grammar checking in AbiWord

AbiWord v2.3.x is parallel installable with AbiWord v2.2 so users can try it out without disturbing their stable AbiWord 2.2 version. Binaries for the various supported platforms will be provided as soon as possble. We are very much interested in any bug you may find. Please report these to http://bugzilla.abisource.com/.

While we encourage people to try out this 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

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Fix AbiWord compile error for GNOME 2.12 by Anonymous George

grammer and word filters

Submitted by foo on Mon, 2005-08-22 01:15.

1. Why is the grammer checking not available for linux? Is this a temporary situation?

2. How are the word filters coming along? Import/Export? It doesn't matter how much I love Abi and want to use it, the fact is I just *can't* use it if it isn't about 99% MS Word compatible (which it hasn't been in the past, even OO.org isn't good enough for me to use at work). Not bitching, just wondering.

1. I think it already works by Anonymous George

Grammar checking was developed on Linux

Submitted by msevior on Mon, 2005-08-22 05:08.

This was just the first release where it has been available for Win32 and OSX.

Martin

Better release notes with nice screenshots..

Submitted by msevior on Sun, 2005-08-21 20:40.

Oh too bad you can't put images into gnomedesktop articles.

uwogs release notes in their full glory with drop shadowed screenshots can be found here:

http://www.abisource.com/release-notes/2.3.5.phtml

Math

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sun, 2005-08-21 22:59.

The first screenshot shows some problems:

1. There is something wrong with the spacing -- everything is too
cramped. ("arctan" is practially typeset on top of itself.)

2. The minus is set as a hyphen, not a minus sign.

3. The sizes of the parentheses are wrong.

4. "dx" is set in the wrong font.

5. The integraion sign sticks too deep.

Yes, I want perfect. I want TeX-quality output.

--Morten

We'll look into it.

Submitted by msevior on Mon, 2005-08-22 05:06.

Hi Morten,
Yes I agree. We will certainly keep working on it.

TeX sets the standard. We strive to meet it.

Martin

be patient by Anonymous George
Unfortunately, yes by Anonymous George
calling all abiword developers :) by Anonymous George

You Can

Submitted by stro on Sun, 2005-08-21 22:55.

Actually you can, I just needed to apply a different filter. Sorry ;)