| Abiword 2.6 -- You've come a long way, baby! |
Apr. 10, 2008
I'll never forget attending the first LinuxWorld trade show in San Francisco in 1999, and getting a marketing hand-out from the Abiword team that was printed on re-used office paper. Almost 10 years later, the nimble Word clone has gotten to be "as good as they come," writes Myank Sharma in a detailed Linux.com review.
According to Sharma, the new 2.6.2 release of Abiword has closed the feature gap with OpenOffice.org's word processor, while running immeasurably faster, and taking up far fewer resources. Abiword pops up a blank new page in a second or two, regardless of the machine, he observes, while OO.org might take 15.
Don't get too excited about trying out the features in the Abiword 2.6.2 release any time soon, though, Sharma suggests, unless you're running Windows, or you're pretty good at building software. While it offers easily-installed Windows binaries, the project relies on downstream distributors to do its Linux binary packaging, and the software is "a pain to install," Sharma reckons.
Surprised to find even the unstable version of Debian stuck back in the 2.4.x zone of Abiword releases, I thought I'd try building it for myself. It was actually not that bad.
The Abiword download, complete with extras, plugins, and docs, weighs in at about 14.5MB for the source code. I was pleased to find the familiar "configure" script in the top-level directory, and so did ./configure --help to see what build options are available.
And wow, there are some neat options there! For instance, "--enable-embedded=generic|hildon|poky" would be great if you were building it for use with an embedded device, especially one running Hildon-based distro's like the Nokia-sponsored Maemo stack, Intel's Moblin, Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded, or Poky, a free distro for small-screen devices. I decided to enable gnome-vfs, which presumably allows the use of gnome dialog boxes, and gnomeui integration. I also decided to build it statically, since it wouldn't be tied into the package management system on my Debian desktop. So I typed "./configure --enable-gnomevfs --enable-gnomeui --enable-static."
Of course, I got a few errors, and had to apt-get the "dev" versions of about a dozen different packages. I'd type the line above in one shell,get an error, then patch the system in response. Here's root's bash shell history for the session:
175 apt-get install g++
176 exit
177 dpkg -l '*glib*'
178 apt-get install libglib2.0-dev
179 apt-get install libglade-2.0-dev
180 dpkg -l 'libglade*'
181 apt-get install libglade2-dev
182 apt-get install libglade2-dev glade glade-gnome
183 apt-cache show glade
184 apt-get install libglade2-dev
185 dpkg -l 'libgnomeprint*'
186 apt-get install libgnomeprint2.2-dev libgnomeprintui2.2-dev
187 dpkg -l 'libgsf*'
188 apt-get install libgsf-1-dev
189 dpkg -l '*enchant*'
190 apt-get install libenchant-dev
191 dpkg -l 'fribidi*'
192 dpkg -l '*fribi*'
193 apt-get install libfribidi-dev
194 dpkg -l '*wv*'
195 apt-get install libwv2-dev
196 dpkg -l '*wv*'
197 apt-get install libwv-dev
198 dpkg -l '*popt*'
199 apt-get install popt libpopt-dev
200 apt-get install libpopt-dev
201 vi /etc/apt/sources.list
202 apt-get update
203 apt-get install libpopt-dev
At the end, you can see where I got tired of waiting on kernel.org servers, and switched my debian mirror to ftp.debian.org. Kernel.org is insanely great if you have a really fat pipe, but debian has much lower latencies.
Anyway, to make a long story short, Abiword 2.6.2 really *does* look impressive. There are amazingly futuristic features, like hooks into Web services, pop-out font previews, and presentation mode, combined with a dead-simple interface that is miles better than OO.org's. Just a real pleasure to use.
  
Abiword 2.6.2 screenshots
(Click any to enlarge)
To tell you the truth, I've always hated OO.org. You have to have it to read all the whacky file formats people send you, when you're a journalist, but it takes sooo long to open, and hogs so much RAM. The graphic below, generated by gmemusage, shows RAM allocations on my Debian desktop. When opened to blank documents, OO uses 60MB of RAM, compared to 30MB for Abiword, compared to 8MB for Bluefish, my long-time word un-processor of choice, thanks to its great macros and search/replace.
gmemusage output. OO is a pig, Abiword is an anteater, Bluefish is a minnow
(Click to enlarge)
I guess I just like efficiency. What's wrong with printing your marketing brochures on the back of old source code proof printouts, anyway? Bravo, Abiword hackers! Bravo!
And, thanks to Myank Sharma over at Linux.com for letting us know how great Abiword has become. His review is here.
--Henry Kingman
(Click here for further information)
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