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Chapter 4

Figure 4-8: OpenOffice.org Writer can import and save various Word doc formats as
well as RTF.

AbiWord: A Simpler Free Alternative to Word

AbiWord is part of a larger project known as AbiSource (www.abisource.com)
started by the SourceGear Corporation, which later released the source code
to a developer community that quickly formed around the project. The proj-
ect's goal was to come up with a free office suite that would run on any
operating system out there, and the community has largely succeeded, with
more than 2.5 million downloads. AbiWord runs on Windows, Linux, Mac
OS X, FreeBSD, and Solaris. It supports right-to-left, left-to-right, and mixed-
mode text for European, Hebrew, and Arabic languages, and offers diction-
aries for more than 30 languages.

AbiWord looks just like Word (no surprise there), except its icons are

larger (see Figure 4-9), it loads faster, and it has less of a memory footprint,
using only about 6 MB of RAM compared to Word's 30 MB or more. It doesn't
try to match Word feature for feature, but it offers most of the features you'd
expect from a word processor. You can employ tables, bullets, lists, images,
footnotes, endnotes, and styles, just like Word. It even offers mail-merging
for creating form letters and replacing fields with text from databases or
spreadsheets.

If you are familiar with Word, you can be very comfortable with AbiWord;

if you have no experience with Word, you won't miss all the obscure features
that make Word a bloated memory hog. You may prefer AbiWord over Open-
Office.org Writer for the same reason--simplicity. AbiWord's code is written

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