O'Reilly blogger boosts Abiword ... and a word-processing roundup

Abiword is one of the great free, open-source, multiplatform programs out there. It looks like Microsoft Word, acts like Microsoft Word, yet is faster than Word -- and it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. The only problem -- no smart quotes (since to the Linux geek world, smart quotes are the devil's -- e.g. Microsoft's -- plaything). But I'm learning to live without them, and Abiword is so damn fast, at least I'm getting something for my trouble.

Jeremiah Foster of O'Reilly's Mac blog tells of his brother's surprise when the Microsoft Word on his new Mac suddenly stopped working. Seems it was a "trial" version. He figured that he already paid for Word (even though he didn't), and didn't want to pay any more, so Jeremiah told him about Abiword:

Abiword looks a lot like Word, or rather how you expect Word to look. I have no idea what Word looks like today, with the release of Vista surely the interface has changed in Word but I do not use it. Abiword has all the right buttons in the usual places, it is very easy to get acquainted with its interface. It has all the tools you’d expect, spell checking, various formatting, plus some things you might not expect. One very handy feature is that it reads and writes all kinds of documents. You can use it to write html for example and of course it can read all your Word documents (.doc) and rich text (.rtf) documents. Abiword also has a versioning system. This is particularly useful if you make multiple revisions of your documents or need to get back text you wrote previously. It changes the text of different revisions to make it clear what has changed. It even has a built in tool to report bugs so you can aid in the development of the software.

I already like Abiword better than Open Office (although OO does do smart quotes) because Abi is so much quicker to load, especially on my older hardware. I also like Ted, another slick word processor, which is even quicker to load than Abiword. The only problem: Ted doesn't save in Word's .doc format ... and it's Linux/Unix only.

Another word processor I've had occasion to use in the last week was KWord, part of the KOffice suite that works with KDE desktops under Linux. KDE is known for being slow, but that doesn't have to be the case, I've learned. MepisLite, the still-developing little brother to the SimplyMepis Linux distribution, is surprisingly responsive for a KDE-bases system -- and it's designed to work on older hardware. KOffice ran great, but the one problem I see so far is, again, no .doc option for saving files -- is that so hard, people? Like it or not, and I really do not, Word is the de facto standard for formatted documents, and it's almost as make-or-break as smart quotes for professional publishing. And if you're calling your suite KOFFICE and KWORD, shouldn't they be compatible with the programs from which their names were derived?

I plan to explore MepisLite and SimplyMepis further, so I imagine I'll spend more time in the KOffice world. For real geeks, including Linux creator Linus Torvalds, KDE is much preferred to GNOME due to the former's greater configurability ... and the geekier the better, right?