Long time no blog. I've been busy working with a group of people on a Nuclear Power Education website. We will fill the "niche" between the Nuclear Power Industry and Greenpeace :-)
In other news the rest of AbiWord team has been hard at work on our next great release, due Any Day Now. So, without further ado..
The AbiWord team is happy to announce AbiWord v2.3.6 for your stress-testing pleasure. This release is virtually identical to what will become AbiWord 2.4, but still contains some bugs that we'd like to see squashed over the next few days.
Since the previous release, equation support has become available to Mac OSX >= 10.3 and Windows NT based systems as well. At the moment of writing these release notes support for Windows 9x/ME systems has been included, but this was not ready in time to go in v2.3.6.
Note: While standard symbol fonts can be used to render equations, the best results are achieved when the Computer Modern fonts are installed. Also note that equation input and rendering are still considered to be experimental. We welcome your feedback on this new feature.
AbiWord v2.3.x is parallel installable with AbiWord v2.2 so users can try it out without disturbing their stable AbiWord 2.2 version. Binaries for the various supported platforms will be provided as soon as possble. For Linux based systems we have again created an easy to use installer ("Autopackage") that should work on virtually every x86 linux distribution. The only requirement is that basic GNOME libraries are installed. This makes it possible for people who are interested in testing this release to instantly install it on their computer, there's no need to compile stuff or wait until it's shipped by the distribution.
The installer includes the following extra functionality ("plugins"):
- Grammar checking (only English supported at the moment)
- Support for entering formulas and equations
- Wordperfect file import
- OpenDocument file import (the OpenOffice.org 2 format)
- Gnumeric charts support (experimental, only works with recent GNOME)
The installer is available from the download page. For more information about Autopackage please visit http://www.autopackage.org.
We are very much interested in any bug you may find. Please report these to http://bugzilla.abisource.com/.
While we encourage people to try out this new snapshot, please be aware that is a development snapshot and is not expected to be stable in any sort of way.
Availability: http://www.abisource.com/download/development.phtml.
More information: http://www.abisource.com/.
Enjoy!
The AbiWord Development Team