You’ve probably heard of the Microsoft Word alternative within Open Office, but have you heard of the other lighter and faster open source software called AbiWord? The software has been around for quite some time (1998), but it doesn’t quite get the recognition it deserves. Go ahead and download it if you haven’t tried out this magnificent piece of software.
AbiWord offers much the same tools as other word processors: spell checking, alignment, tables, collaboration, lists, word count, dictionary, grammar check (although it needs work), header/footer, along with many others.
The main focus of AbiWord is speed. This document takes just a 3 seconds to open on a laptop several years old. Using Open Office Word it takes roughly 20 seconds to open.
AbiWord is also quite smaller than its competitors at around 10MB for the entire piece of software. Open Office Word by itself is 22.4MB when not including the core, java-common, base-common, etc.
Although AbiWord is lighter, faster, and has been around for ages it still has its problems. One of these just so happens to be a bug with Compiz-the 3D graphics available on several Linux OSes, including Ubuntu.
The problem exists specifically with the cursor and highlighting portion of AbiWord. You’ll see exactly what I mean if you have tried running AbiWord with Compiz enabled.
To fix the problem in Ubuntu, go to Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects and select ‘None’. Of course, this will also turn off the other flashy features like transparent windows. For some, this may be too much of a setback to run AbiWord. For others, like me, it isn’t. Less RAM is wasted by turning it off and we get to use AbiWord, a much, much faster alternative to Open Office, especially when we just wish to read a simple document.
I do have one specific complaint about AbiWord (other than this one, of course). And that happens to be the default file type: abw. I would love to know why the open source community has put up with this for so long. Why not go the extra step with odt? It seems almost like a pathetic attempt to gain more market share. Sorry AbiWord, but if you don’t have more of a following after eleven years or a major change in direction, chances are that you probably won’t even beat out Open Office anytime soon.
Written: May 29, 2009
0 Responses to "AbiWord: The Lighter and Faster Alternative"
No comments yet.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
