of the extraneous functions into plug-ins. AbiWord lets you install plug-ins
such as a dictionary, a thesaurus, a Google searcher, and translators from
Babelfish and FreeTranslation. Also available are AbiPaint for painting simple
images and graphics, and AbiGimp for photo and image manipulation. The
Google plug-in lets you search Google with your selected text.
memory and runs on just about every type of computer system.
even offers a command line for executing some of its functions, to make it
easier to run operations on a server, such as generating form letters, printing
documents, or converting documents to another file format. Like OpenOffice
.org, AbiWord saves a document in a compressed ASCII text file with XML
(eXtended Markup Language) markups, which makes the document file
easy to open and read using any text editor and easy to process with XML
tools. While OpenOffice.org Writer gets more publicity as an open source
alternative to Word, AbiWord is a lean, fast, and cross-platform open source
alternative that looks more like Word, especially on a Mac.