10 Mar 2004 hub   » (Master)

mx : have you tried AbiWord ? Surely not perfect, but it is a good alternative (ok, I'm biased).

Office Wars

There seems to be sort of a competition beetween OpenOffice and GNOME Office. Of course, this is not an armed conflict, but currently OpenOffice seems to have won a big battle as it seesm to have won recognition in the IT world. One of the reason is that it is backed up by companies like Sun and Ximian/Novell. The other is that it has a decent feature set and offers fairly good compatibility with the de-facto monopoly files, I name Micrososft Office.

I myself prefer using GNOME Office. One of the reason is that it is not a behemoth like OpenOffice and that my old machine is not brought down each time I start it. Gnumeric is probably the jewel of the suite. I use it exclusively since 2001, without any problem.

When it comes to compare Abiword and OpenOffice's oowrite, I must say that OpenOffice did a lot of progress, and the program is far from being slow.... beside startup time. I have done a comparison, and, for example, opening the RTF spec in Abiword takes way much longer than in OpenOffice. We have a real problem here, and much to learn from competition. And face to face, OpenOffice has a much better feature set. I know understand why more people seems to use OO and not Abiword.

Abiword

Fixed some 64-bits compilation issues. Hint: don't interchange void * and long. I started to confidentially spread a pre-2.1.1 MacOS X build for Panther. Feedback seems to be positive. Cool. But there is so much work to do to have a polished product.

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