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AbiWord-2.4 Released!

Submitted by msevior on Mon, 2005-10-03 19:19. AbiWord
AbiWord

We're proud to announce AbiWord-2.4.

AbiWord 2.4 is a multi-platform word processor that combines state-of-the-art usability, powerful features, and excellent interoperability. Furthermore, it features a powerful framework to extend the program as needed. AbiWord 2.4 is the most stable and capable AbiWord release ever. In addition to hundreds of bug fixes reported by our users, it contains several exciting new features.

  •  Grammar Checking

  •  Tight Image Wrapping

  •  Equations

  •  OpenDocument support

  •  GNOME-Office charting

  •  and more improvements everywhere!

AbiWord has always been a lightweight and fast application. These core features have not been sacrificed to provide the new functionality offered by AbiWord 2.4. Equation support, grammar checking and GNOME-Office charting are all available as plugins that users can install to their liking.

Complete Release notes: http://www.abisource.com/release-notes/2.4.0.phtml

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

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

Enjoy!

  The AbiWord Development Team

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OpenDocument support by Anonymous George

It is supported. We read it

Submitted by msevior on Sun, 2005-10-09 09:36.

It is supported. We read it very well.
We can't yet write but our friends from Nokia are working hard on that too.

You need the plugins.

deps and rpm list

Submitted by Anonymous George on Thu, 2005-10-06 04:37.

how about a list of deps and rpms like before. i don't like autopackage and will not use it until it just works.

Does that mean it doesn't work?

Submitted by FooBarWidget on Fri, 2005-10-07 08:58.

If the autopackage doesn't work for you, then we'd like to know why! Could you tell me more about the problem? Do you get any specific error messages when trying to install the autopackage?

If you're an Ubuntu Hoary user: the problem has been fixed in 1.0.7 (which is almost released). Please read my other comment on this page for details.

We never listed .deps. As

Submitted by uwog on Fri, 2005-10-07 07:14.

We never listed .deps. As for the rpms: I'm a Fedora Extras maintainer now, and am making 2.4.0 rpms available through yum for every release.

AbiWord 2.4.0 is already in FC4 and FC5. Rpms for FC3 will be in FC3-Extras soon as well. This is way more convenient for most users then downloading rpms manually.

Please consult your distro's

Submitted by robsta on Thu, 2005-10-06 07:35.

Please consult your distro's package management tool about that.
We don't have the resources to track when and which distribution packages some new version of AbiWord.
Apart from that the fedora packages are now maintained directly in fedora extras.

That said the autopackage is doing quite well with fewer than five bugreports for about 1000 downloads. Personally I'm considering that "it works".

- Rob

Vi keybindings by Anonymous George

stupid question ...

Submitted by Anonymous George on Wed, 2005-10-05 06:54.

"Tight Image Wrapping" how does it fit into open document standard?
Is this there? if not it is proposed as an addition?
thank you

It is there in a pretty

Submitted by robsta on Wed, 2005-10-05 08:41.

It is there in a pretty extensive manner.

Formulas pretty impressive

Submitted by Anonymous George on Tue, 2005-10-04 11:10.

Not quite as good as TeX, but so far my tests came up quite good.

One problem: in \lim_{x\rightarrow 0^+} \frac{\sin(x)}{x}=1, both the lim and the sin came up in italics. That's very unusual. They should be in roman type.

Minor nitpicking: probably under the influence of other office suites, Abiword misuses the term "equation". "Insert equation" and "equation editor" can be used to insert not only equations, but also inequalities, expressions, logic statements etc.

The actual editor needs work. It feels like editing TeX in pico all over again. Things like bracket/parenthesis matching, highlighting, syntax checking are standard for editing raw LaTeX these days. For more user-friendly editor, for a start, I recommend simply ripping of the editor from LyX, it's the best one I have seen so far. Then build on top of that.

"Equation" Editting...

Submitted by msevior on Tue, 2005-10-04 19:26.

We had a big debate about using the term "Equation". We endded up going wtih "Equation" because generally people know what that means.

I would have liked to use the term "Insert Maths" but our American friends said that looks strange. They seemed to think "Insert Math" made sense but that looks too weird for me.

I guess we could have had an en-US translation to turn "Maths" into "Math"

Well anyway...

Regarding the quality of the output, expect it to continually improve. Luca is constantly tweaking gtkmathview.

I fully agree about the edittor. I really miss the syntax highlighting and parenthesis matching I get in emacs.

I expect we'll integrate gtksourceview to give these for the gnome build pretty soon.

Regarding a point and click math entry thingy, Luca is also working on one of those for gtkmathview. Knowing Luca's passion for getting things right I expect it will be the best on the market. He has spent a long term looking at all the alternatives.

Having said that, I like the Lyx equation edittor.

Buggy?

Submitted by Anonymous George on Mon, 2005-10-03 23:59.

Some simple things don't seem to work in this release :-(.

  1. Insert a header and then undo it -> crash
  2. Insert an equation and then show formatting marks -> crash
  3. Insert an equation and then undo it -> undo doesn't work?
  4. Type some stuff after an equation and then save as a text file -> file is empty

I found those problems within the first few moments of messing around with the new release, so I guess I'll have to stick with 2.2 until 2.4 is stabilized a bit more. Good luck!

Fixed thanks!

Submitted by msevior on Tue, 2005-10-04 00:53.

I just fixed these in CVS HEAD.

Damn! Both were trivial fixes we should have known about before the release. We really missed sum1 during the these two months.

Please inform us of other bugs (bugzilla is much better than this forum) and we'll fix them.

File Bug Reports by Anonymous George

Formulas in AbiWord 2.4

Submitted by Andrey on Mon, 2005-10-03 22:16.

How I can get support for formulas in AbiWord? I have compiled AbiWord 2.4 under Linux with GNOME 2.12 support, launched it and have not seen any menu entry to insert an equation. Same with charts.

You need to to compile the plugins

Submitted by msevior on Mon, 2005-10-03 22:35.

You also need to compile the abimathview plugin (in abiword-plugins) and the gtkmathview library (from the GNOME project) with the following configure line:

./configure --disable-boxml --disable-gmetadom --disable-libxml2-reader --disable-custom-reader --enable-pipe --prefix=/your/favourite/directory

For the charts you need to compile the abigochart (in abiword-plugins) plugin which needs the goffice-0.04 library from the GNOME projet.

I believe that AbiWord-2.4 including all the plugins and the computer modern fonts you need for maths are already available in Fedore Core 4 Extras.

Thanks to Redhat trusting Marc (uwog) Maurer.

abiword plugin source by Anonymous George
The single source tarball by Anonymous George

Autopackage doesn't work in Ubuntu Hoary

Submitted by Anonymous George on Mon, 2005-10-03 21:10.

I have the latest version of Auto package 1.0.6 as of writting this and the installer complains everytime saying it the gnome office package fails to install.

This bug has been fixed in

Submitted by FooBarWidget on Fri, 2005-10-07 09:00.

This bug has been fixed in autopackage 1.0.7, which is currently at RC3. The final version will be released soon. To install 1.0.7 RC3, download http://ftp.sunsite.dk/projects/autopackage/1.0.7/autopackage.tar.bz2 and put autopackage.tar.bz2 in the same folder as the AbiWord package, then run the AbiWord package. It will then automatically use autopackage.tar.bz2 (1.0.7 RC3) instead of downloading the autopackage 1.0.6 runtime from the web. Please tell me whether it works for you.

If you have problem with the

Submitted by isak on Tue, 2005-10-04 04:45.

If you have problem with the installer, you can drop by our forums and perhaps we can help you work this out:

http://autopackage.org/forums/index.php

Congratulations

Submitted by Anonymous George on Mon, 2005-10-03 20:43.

Congrats everybody! This release is highly anticipated and greatly appreciated.