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Modernizing AbiWord code

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Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#41

Post by ciconia »

derefr wrote: post #17
sandyarmstrong wrote: post #2

AbiWord is my favorite word processor. It was so much less bloated than any other graphical option. I wrote pretty much all of my papers in college with it. It reminded me of my previous favorite from my youth: Claris Word. Glad to see it's still alive. Updating to C++11 should make it a lot more appealing for new contributors.

I used AbiWord years ago, and do recall it being pretty lean. I get sort of the same feeling , these days, from Apple's Pages, though I'm not sure whether that's true. (Looking at the copy of it I have sitting around, the application bundle is 418MB, with 344MB of that being taken up by the Resources (icons, UI elements, translation strings) and SharedSupport (themes, templates) folders, leaving the app itself sittin…

Apple Pages is a toy. It's missing some pretty basic features like even/odd page margins, and becomes annoyingly slow once you do stuff like tables inside multiple columns. I recently prepared a pretty complex but not very long document using it and the experience was pretty unpleasant.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#42

Post by frik »

bsharitt wrote: post #15
sandyarmstrong wrote: post #2

AbiWord is my favorite word processor. It was so much less bloated than any other graphical option. I wrote pretty much all of my papers in college with it. It reminded me of my previous favorite from my youth: Claris Word. Glad to see it's still alive. Updating to C++11 should make it a lot more appealing for new contributors.

I used it back when OpenOffice was just too slow and bloated to use very well on most computers I owned ~10 years ago and earlier. But through a combination of improved OpenOffice/LibreOffice performance and faster computers, I finally drifted away from AbiWord. For one, I still had to install OpenOffice for PowerPoint type work, so it was there anyway and it usually kept up with MS format compatibility better than A…

StarOffice 5.1 run fine on a Pentium 133MHz on Win95. It come from a German company which got bought buy Novell and rebranded and open sourced as OpenOffice 1x.

Comparing StarOffice 5.1 and LibreOffice 4, lottle has changed. Well, the same can be said between Office 97 and Office 2016. The office suits were already feature complete in the late nineties, and conceptional issues still plague us 20 year later, as those programs saw only increamental improvements. While StarOffice was in good shape, OpenOffice was always in more rough shape, but nowadays LibreOffice cares more to deliver a more polished UX.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#43

Post by gtufano »

frik wrote: post #42
bsharitt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used it back when OpenOffice was just too slow and bloated to use very well on most computers I owned ~10 years ago and earlier. But through a combination of improved OpenOffice/LibreOffice performance and faster computers, I finally drifted away from AbiWord. For one, I still had to install OpenOffice for PowerPoint type work, so it was there anyway and it usually kept up with MS format compatibility better than A…

StarOffice 5.1 run fine on a Pentium 133MHz on Win95. It come from a German company which got bought buy Novell and rebranded and open sourced as OpenOffice 1x. Comparing StarOffice 5.1 and LibreOffice 4, lottle has changed. Well, the same can be said between Office 97 and Office 2016. The office suits were already feature complete in the late nineties, and conceptional issues still plague us 20 year later, as those…

Star Division was bought by Sun Microsystems (later bought by Oracle). I was there, then.

That's the original reason we have Oracle OpenOffice: Open Office part derived from Sun's OpenOffice; the Oracle part the reason for the split between LibreOffice and OpenOffice. ;-)

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#44

Post by pjmlp »

hub_ wrote: post #36
chris_wot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GNOME project decided not to be serious with GNOME Office years and years ago. Imagine if they had put their effort into it though? Almost certainly they would have been at the forefront of desktop options and a good likelihood as a candidate for corporations.

You know it is hard to order people to do something when they aren't paid. Even project like OpenOffice.org that had commercial venture had hardship with funding. Oracle cancelled it, Novell cancelled it, IBM do whatever they want, etc. All in all, GNOME Office didn't happen. Some bits did, though. AbiWord was always broader than GNOME. And Gnumeric is great IMHO. And people see the future in the cloud.

It became clear to me that there isn't any money to be made in desktop FOSS software, as most users either pay for their tools, or end up pirating or using FOSS software if they don't plan to spend any money.

Desktop software just isn't the same as sellling consulting, trainings or SaaS licenses behind browser paywalls that server based software enjoys.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#45

Post by sccxy »

ciconia wrote: post #41
derefr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used AbiWord years ago, and do recall it being pretty lean. I get sort of the same feeling , these days, from Apple's Pages, though I'm not sure whether that's true. (Looking at the copy of it I have sitting around, the application bundle is 418MB, with 344MB of that being taken up by the Resources (icons, UI elements, translation strings) and SharedSupport (themes, templates) folders, leaving the app itself sittin…

Apple Pages is a toy. It's missing some pretty basic features like even/odd page margins, and becomes annoyingly slow once you do stuff like tables inside multiple columns. I recently prepared a pretty complex but not very long document using it and the experience was pretty unpleasant.

+1

Also Apple has abandoned it. Last update was 5 months ago.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#46

Post by takno »

derefr wrote: post #17
sandyarmstrong wrote: post #2

AbiWord is my favorite word processor. It was so much less bloated than any other graphical option. I wrote pretty much all of my papers in college with it. It reminded me of my previous favorite from my youth: Claris Word. Glad to see it's still alive. Updating to C++11 should make it a lot more appealing for new contributors.

I used AbiWord years ago, and do recall it being pretty lean. I get sort of the same feeling , these days, from Apple's Pages, though I'm not sure whether that's true. (Looking at the copy of it I have sitting around, the application bundle is 418MB, with 344MB of that being taken up by the Resources (icons, UI elements, translation strings) and SharedSupport (themes, templates) folders, leaving the app itself sittin…

A manual typewriter is even better for this. You really lose the temptation to constantly go back and fiddle with what you're writing when fiddling involves hammering through retyping the whole page

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#47

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

derefr wrote: post #17
sandyarmstrong wrote: post #2

AbiWord is my favorite word processor. It was so much less bloated than any other graphical option. I wrote pretty much all of my papers in college with it. It reminded me of my previous favorite from my youth: Claris Word. Glad to see it's still alive. Updating to C++11 should make it a lot more appealing for new contributors.

I used AbiWord years ago, and do recall it being pretty lean. I get sort of the same feeling , these days, from Apple's Pages, though I'm not sure whether that's true. (Looking at the copy of it I have sitting around, the application bundle is 418MB, with 344MB of that being taken up by the Resources (icons, UI elements, translation strings) and SharedSupport (themes, templates) folders, leaving the app itself sittin…

Exactly that.

I edited a news-stand magazine for six years using TextEdit. My job was the words, and TextEdit did that fine. When the words were complete, I passed the .rtf over to the designer who made it all look beautiful in InDesign. Word would have provided nothing extra I needed, and a lot of distractions that just get in the way. (I still use TextEdit for my freelance writing work.)

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#48

Post by takno »

frik wrote: post #42
bsharitt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used it back when OpenOffice was just too slow and bloated to use very well on most computers I owned ~10 years ago and earlier. But through a combination of improved OpenOffice/LibreOffice performance and faster computers, I finally drifted away from AbiWord. For one, I still had to install OpenOffice for PowerPoint type work, so it was there anyway and it usually kept up with MS format compatibility better than A…

StarOffice 5.1 run fine on a Pentium 133MHz on Win95. It come from a German company which got bought buy Novell and rebranded and open sourced as OpenOffice 1x. Comparing StarOffice 5.1 and LibreOffice 4, lottle has changed. Well, the same can be said between Office 97 and Office 2016. The office suits were already feature complete in the late nineties, and conceptional issues still plague us 20 year later, as those…

Star office 5.1 could run on pretty limited hardware, but honestly it's a stretch to describe it as feature complete. That was the bad old days when I had to boot into windows to get most non coding work done.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#49

Post by oever »

ravenstine wrote: post #23

I liked AbiWord. It was very lean and GTK+ friendly. But I always had little gotchas with the formatting and problems with ODF occurring between word processors that didn't occur as often when originating from LibreOffice. It had the clean/snappy interface that LibreOffice should have had, but definitely not the document feature support it needed. These days, I'm not sure why anyone would bother trying to revive AbiW…

Microsoft Office and Google Docs are examples of applications that require internet access and report information about the user to the software provider. That provider in turn can share that information with advertisers. That is a trade-off that not everybody is willing to make.

There are applications like Etherpad, WebODF (supplied with packages like ownCloud) that make it possible to work from the browser but on a server that you can choose. Even desktop applications can be used in this way via LibreOffice Online or open365.io.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#50

Post by frik »

gtufano wrote: post #43
frik wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StarOffice 5.1 run fine on a Pentium 133MHz on Win95. It come from a German company which got bought buy Novell and rebranded and open sourced as OpenOffice 1x. Comparing StarOffice 5.1 and LibreOffice 4, lottle has changed. Well, the same can be said between Office 97 and Office 2016. The office suits were already feature complete in the late nineties, and conceptional issues still plague us 20 year later, as those…

Star Division was bought by Sun Microsystems (later bought by Oracle). I was there, then. That's the original reason we have Oracle OpenOffice: Open Office part derived from Sun's OpenOffice; the Oracle part the reason for the split between LibreOffice and OpenOffice. ;-)

Oh, yes I mixed hat up. It was Sun Microsystems.

SuSE/Novell had a license deal with Microsoft. MS sold SuSE Linux and Novell added improved Office format and VBA compatibility to their OpenOffice fork.

IBM forked OpenOffice for their Lotus suite. IBM Lotus Symphony.

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