Abiword has smart quotes!!

I haven't run the AbiWord word processor in an age. I barely ever run OpenOffice, or MS Office, or any office software outside of Google Docs.

But this Fedora 13 Xfce desktop included AbiWord and Gnumeric instead of the heavier OpenOffice, and I decided to give AbiWord a try again.

AbiWord is pretty great. It's super fast, and version 2.8.4 in Fedora includes the spell-checker (I often had trouble getting spell-checking to work in other distros). If you just want to do word-processing and do it quickly, there's nothing better than AbiWord.

I was looking for the word-wrap settings (still don't know if these exist ...) and instead learned that AbiWord now offers SMART QUOTES. Now if you read entries from this blog in 2007, you could glean that I was somewhat obsessed with smart quotes in word-processing documents.

I had an editor at the time who took Word documents and basically plowed them into print. If you had "smart quotes" in your document — you know, with the open-quotes curving one way, the close-quotes the other — your printed output would look great. Otherwise it would look ... not so good.

So I was on a mission to find word-processing software that was a) free b) fast and c) handled smart quotes well.

And now AbiWord includes smart quotes. I probably complained 80 separate times in this blog, and the feature is here.

This almost makes me want to go back to Abiword. Thanks to the entire Abiword team who put in a feature that geeks sneer at but regular people pretty much expect.

From the Abiword home page, here's the announcement for version 2.8:

Oct 27, 2009
AbiWord 2.8 has been released! This milestone supports annotations, or "comments", smart quotes and native SVGs. Furthermore it includes powerful collaboration capabilities allowing multiple people to work on one document at the same time. These features are tightly integrated with a new online web service called AbiCollab.net, which lets you store documents online, allows easy document sharing with your friends, and performs format conversions on the fly.
Read the release announcement here.

With all these new features, I'm just about to update the Abiword on my Windows XP box, and enjoy the extreme quickness it offers over OpenOffice (again ... like I've actually even fired up OO over the past 6 months).