AbiWord

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AbiWord is a free software, cross-platform, GPL-licensed word processing program. It can be used in the operating systems GNU/Linux, Mac OS X (PowerPC), Microsoft Windows (not maintained), ReactOS, BeOS, AmigaOS 4.0 (through the Cygwin X11 engine), among others.

The name AbiWord is derived from the root of the Spanish word "Open". In English, it is pronounced as the "abbey word" ("Abbey word").

Features

Abiword is characterized by the simplicity of its interface and the low technical requirements that allow it to be used on equipment considered obsolete. It also has import/export filters for documents from their native format to XML, RTF, HTML, Microsoft Word, LaTeX and OpenDocument.

AbiWord has a plugin to look up the Wikipedia reference for any previously selected word.

History of the Project

AbiWord is part of a larger project known as AbiSource, which was started by the SourceGear Corporation. The goal of the project was to develop the platform for an office suite that was free software, beginning with the word processor project.

SourceGear released the source code around 1998 and a community of developers quickly formed around it, both worked together until in the year 2000 SourceGear abandoned the project in which it had been for 2 years, and the same happened to be a project maintained exclusively by a community of volunteers led by Dom Lachowicz.

The volunteer developer community has continued to make improvements and increase the quality of AbiWord ever since. Version 1.0 was released in April 2002, followed by version 2.0 in September 2003, 2.2 in December 2004, and 2.4 in September 2005.

Project Development

The AbiWord project is a type of project that is being led by groups of volunteers from all over the world, where new versions appear frequently, so it can be said that this development model is "Bazaar" style. Abiword's development follows the free software project development model, which often seems disorganized, however, development leaders assign the various participants specific tasks.

When the project was released, Dom Lachowicz was chosen as the responsible project leader by an agreement between all the members, subsequently for each operating system version (GNU/Linux, QNX, Mac, Windows) there is a person in charge called platform maintainer, whose task is fundamentally to make decisions in the area of the project they are in charge of.

On the other hand, Abiword users and developers communicate daily through the different lists of the project and via chat; On a weekly basis, a compilation of the most important events that has happened in the development of the application is made and published in a newsletter with the purpose of keeping people up to date on the development of the project.

Annually, a part of the group of main developers and Abiword enthusiasts meets at GUADEC, which is the annual conference of GNOME programmers and serves as a meeting place. In this face-to-face meeting, the functionalities that will be included in the next versions of the project are usually agreed upon based on the ideas that users and developers have been commenting on. The direction of the project in the coming months is included in the roadmap, which also includes who will be responsible for implementing each of the new features.[citation required].

It is worth mentioning that users play a very important role in the direction the project takes since they can vote on which bugs they want to be fixed first, they can also propose new features, and they can report any problem they have so that the developers can have it documented and can correct it in the next versions of the program.

Related Industry

AbiWord was initially developed by the company SourceGear in 1998. The company's idea was to create a complete cross-platform free software office suite and create a community around the project that would help them create the product. In less time, all this idea arose because at that time there was no office suite that led the market, however, only the word processor was developed, since the development of the product took much more time and effort than they thought.

Eric Sink, the founder of SourceGear, acknowledges that the company's main mistake was trying to profit the way proprietary software vendors have traditionally done. After more than two years of development and faced with the impossibility of generating profits that would pay the cost of developing the product, SourceGear abandoned the idea of Abiword and turned the project over to the free software community. The project server was hosted at the University of Twente and today continues its development by a group of volunteers.[citation needed]

Current state

The most recent stable version is 3.0.5, released on July 3, 2021. The most significant changes from its latest versions are support for the GTK+ development library version 3, in addition to continuing with version 2, and with future plans to switch to Qt. It also incorporates drag and drop in RDF documents, double buffering for line drawing, and implementation of the SVG format.

At first glance you won't notice many changes, but internally the code has been debugged to correct errors such as those in OpenDocument formats, fixes in more than 60 languages and several more.

Due to the limited development of Abiword on Microsoft Windows, the latest version for this operating system is 3.0.0.

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