Brian Durant wrote: > Thanks for the info. I have a few questions, as I was unable to access the site > from here. Things aren't working 100% as most of Jakarta is flooded these days. > > 1) Does AbiWord work with Evolution for spell checking or is AbiWord part of a > different Office package that has a seperate e-mail client?
My first answer might have been that AbiWord is not part of an office suite, but I forgot that it has been "adopted" by Gnome as their word processor (and part of their suite which includes gnumeric (spreadsheet) and whatever. (I am not a Gnome user -- I know they have a web browser (Galeon??) and I'm quite certain they have a mail client (could it be Evolution, or is that Ximian??). Anyway, AbiWord: * is cross platform. More often than not, I test under Windows * has spellchecking built in (using ispell or aspell (or both?? -- I get mixed up) > 2) We have a multilingual family. We need spell checking in Danish, French, > German and Spanish. I might be interested in seeing Russian spell checking as > well, though I don't use my Russian much these days. Does AbiWord provide all of > this? AbiWord is multilingual. A group of translators works to update the strings to various languages. Spanish, German, French, and Russian are definitely supported, and I am fairly certain there are spell checking dictionaries available for each of those. I'd bet Danish is supported, but just don't necessarily recall seeing it mentioned during discussions on the list. AbiWord also handles Chinese and similar ideographic (the right word?) languages, and bidirectional languages like Hebrew (and Arabic?). The bidirectional support is currently not part of the standard distribution, it is available as "debug" builds if you would need it. > 3) Is there an RPM package for Mandrake? Well, yes. It comes with Mandrake, but I'm not sure which version is there. On the website, there are rpms, but I'm not sure those are Mandrake specific. I have seen Mandrake builds appear on cooker, if you are familiar with the caveats about that. > 4) What dependencies are needed. I only run KDE normally these days, with > Easel's departure from the scene. I do however, still use Evolution (0.9 with > Mandrake 8 Power Pack). I'm not sure about the dependencies. Since some version of AbiWord has come with Mandrake 7.2 and 8.1 (and presumably others), I think most of the dependencies are built in to Mandrake. If you use a later version, you may need some newer stuff, but if you have any trouble finding it, let me know, or join the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mail list and ask there. AbiWord is not even dependent on Gnome -- there is a Gnome version which I'm sure has some dependencies, but there are also non-Gnome versions. (AbiWord works on Windows and Gnome or non-Gnome Linux, efforts are underway to port it to MacIntosh, were underway to port it to Beos (and were partially working, IIUC), and efforts have addressed other platforms which I can't recite off the top of my head.) AbiWord is currently at something like version 0.99-1, and the developer's efforts are focused on bug fixing prior to a 1.0 release. The 1.0 release will not handle tables, that is planned for 1.2 (six months to a year??). AbiWord does handle styles and embedded graphics. The native document format is XML (with its own DTD). It can import Word documents reasonably well (handling those features which it currently supports), it cannot export a native .doc file, but it can export .rtf which Word can import quite well. It also can import and export several other formats, including HTML and (simple) DocBook. It is open source. Randy Kramer (I'm not a "real" developer -- more a "wannabee" and sometime tester and commentor.)
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