By Craig Kirkwood
May 16, 2002

AbiWord is a free word processing application released under the GNU General Public License. A Linux version has been around for a while but earlier this month, a Windows version was finally delivered along with a Mac OS X version.

The tough thing about WP applications is they are, inevitably, compared to the mother, grandmother and papa of them all, Microsoft Word. In fact, building a WP is not much use at all if it can't read Microsoft's proprietary and ubiquitous .doc format. Thankfully, AbiWord can do just that.

As the documentation says "AbiWord can open basic Microsoft Word documents well. However, if the document has complicated tables, embedded spreadsheets, and so forth, then it might not as intended. Developing good MS Word filters is a very difficult process, so please bear with us as we work on getting Word documents to open correctly".

In our brief lab tests here at Planet Publish, most documents seemed to open just fine. Some were a little less well formatted than others but largely, the results were very impressive. Styles did not import consistently - either from RTF or native Word format - but they can be easily created and, miraculously, behave better than Word's notoriously "liberal" styles facility.

A limited number of graphics filters enable placement of images - although not JPEG or GIF format - the latter presumably due to the expensive royalty fees payable for the LZW algorithm.

Multiple windows can be opened, spell checking and language selection is available, as are bullets, paragraph numbering and the three most-used document views employed by Word: print view, Web view and "normal" view. There is no support for outline view (unfortunately since this is particularly useful for structured documents) but no doubt that's coming...

AbiWord is developed as an Open Source project, meaning the source code is freely available and re-distributable. Unlike proprietary software, code that is written and often kept secret by a select few, Open Source projects like AbiWord give away the code and the software is thus subjected to thorough peer review by programmers all over the world.

If you're fed up with Microsoft, try AbiWord out - it's worth it just because you can. Further information: www.abisource.com.