Sunday, April 15, 2007

AbiWord

AbiWord

Website: http://www.abisource.com/

AbiWord is a light weight, stand alone word processor that can read and write a large number of document formats, including MS-Word. Due to its small size it is well suited for use on older hardware, and will run happily on a 486DX with 16MB of RAM, while still letting you edit all the relevant document formats of today. Key features include HTML export, unlimited undo and redo, support for spell checking, styles, columns, tables, images, and bulleted/numbered lists.

There are a number of optional plug-ins available, including a thesaurus, Babelfish translation interface, and spelling dictionaries in many languages. It is automatically localized in a large number of languages; just change the locale setting in your Windows control panel and AbiWord automatically appears in the language you selected. Abiword is also bidirectional, offering support for right-to-left languages. If you simply need a word processor with the most common features, rather than a full office suite, then AbiWord is a good choice. AbiWord is available on multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, MacOSX and Unix.