(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hello, I read in this forum that Abiword has a 20 pages limit for stability and that it has problems with tables. Is that true?

All my colleagues send me MS Word documents, now in docx format and I meed to edit with footnotes and all.

Maybe it is just better to use Google docs, but not always compatible 100%. Not sure if Libreoffice is better.

Thanks

Forget using Abiword.
Libreoffice should be able to do what you need.
Try it out. Costs you nothing.
Best way to get the latest LibreOffice is use this program.
get_libreoffice
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=65918

I'm not sure if anything other than MS Word is one-hundred percent compatible with the newer .docx format... but, yeah, I'd give OpenOffice/LibreOffice a try. (Possibly both; LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, but I don't know if either is any more compatible with .docx than the other.)

AbiWord tends, in my opinion and experience, to be somewhat buggy and unstable. Across all three OSes, and multiple versions.

I couldn't tell you for sure, but I thought I heard Google Docs was essentially using the OpenOffice/LibreOffice code to handle .docx. It wouldn't surprise me if that were true, though.

Thanks for the replies.
I have both Abiword and Libreoffice in Windows, plus Word 97 which is too old now. Libreoffice seems more updated than Openoffice.
I did not know Abiword can give problems, thanks for confirming. I like it is small.
I think I will use Google docs and later install Libreoffice if needed.
If only people with the latest version of Word saved files as doc compatible with older versions everything would work, but they do not care.

Rope wrote:Hello, I read in this forum that Abiword has a 20 pages limit for stability and that it has problems with tables. Is that true?

All my colleagues send me MS Word documents, now in docx format and I meed to edit with footnotes and all.

Maybe it is just better to use Google docs, but not always compatible 100%. Not sure if Libreoffice is better.

Thanks

I can confirm this. I've had AbiWord documents corrupted. It's not nice to lose a day of writing.

I have used Abiword actively for a long time with puppy linux. At the university, I have used Emacs for all work involving a programming language, or the use of LaTex templates for letters and all tech papers, and OpenOffice Writer for a quick letter or note.
For me Abiword has worked very well. The 20-page limit is unknown to me, I have docs of 80-90 pages in both .abw and .odt formats, that I regularly open to make additions. There were some incidents with earlier versions, where Abi just quit for no appearant reason, but that is history. I have had trouble with pasting text, making the whole or part of a document translate into some gibberish language. The gibberish language can be avoided with using 'paste unformatted' from the menu - or 'Ctrl+.' instead of 'Ctrl+V' from the keyboard. It is only affecting the screen rendering in my docs, not the raw document, so saving is no problem. Scrolling often fixes the gibberish language too. There is also an auto save function, that can be activated in the preferences.
Other that that, I cannot recall having had any big problems with Abiword, I like it a lot. OpenOffice/LibreOffice is simply too big, and it is really only the OO/Writer I have used; nothing compares to Abiwords mate, Gnumeric, when it comes to spreadsheets. I never work with .doc docs, but I understand that Abiword is one of the best alternatives in that department.
And please remember: We all have different needs and expectations, and the perfect word processor simply does not exist! Really!

tallboy

I use abiword for quick viewing of documents, because it loads lightning fast. But I don't use it for anything that I have to edit.

Libreoffice is quite good with many features and works nicely. My only problem is that it changes the formatting of footnotes somewhat from msword, and some of my documents have hundreds of footnotes.

I generally use msword 2003 using wine. It runs well, and can handle docx files. (Libreoffice actually seems to have more features, especially for dealing with pictures and html, but 99% of my work is more old fashioned documents, so I find that word works well.

I will say that there is actually some sense to the docx format. If a docx file gets corrupted, generally you can recover most of the text of the file (but not the formatting). My understanding is that .doc and .rtf files have text encoded in such a way that if the file has any errors the text is harder to recover.

For scholastic and statistical mathematics reasons, I can't live without Word and Excel, and to a lesser extent, PowerPoint. In saying so, LibreOffice seems to handle docx better than < 2003 Word's doc (or rtf). Must be the new XML format, I don't know. Versions prior to 2007 used a Latex-wannabe formatting language and made the file a compiled binary. Same with xls.

I prefer Gnumeric over Calc simply because its stats functions are better than LO's and has a layout very alike Excel's. With a minor bit of work it'd leave Excel in the dust.

Abiword? Nope, can't do it. It simply lacks the functions and formatting I need for the scientific writing I do. I like that's it free and they're earnest about creating it for all to use, but alas, it just isn't good enough for serious scholastic and technical writing.

LO need to nuke all remaining Java requirements, reduce its memory footprint, maybe prettify its UI a little and then they'd really have the killer Unix app. They're almost there.

Cheers,
Peter

AbiWord is a light-weight word processor. It does not pretend to match the features of LibreOffice Writer or Microsoft Word, but for the ordinary uses to which most people would want to put a word processor, it is perfectly adequate.

I occasionally turn to LibreOffice if I need to do something more complicated, but for day-to-day work AbiWord is just fine.

tallboy wrote:The 20-page limit is unknown to me, I have docs of 80-90 pages in both .abw and .odt formats, that I regularly open to make additions.

I agree. Back when I first discovered Puppy Linux in the days of version 4.1.2 I started compiling an AbiWord document that contained anything Puppy-Linux-related that I thought might be useful to remember. I have been constantly adding to that document ever since. It is now up to 71 pages and still going strong. I have no idea where the notion of a 20 page limit comes from.

If you don't care to upload your documents to an external server, this conversion web might help you:
http://www.zamzar.com/fileformats/docx

Saludos.

Hmm I have had abiword fall in a heap with 2 or three pages but perhaps the problem lies when opening documents from other software rather than a file generated within abiword. It may alse depend on the gtk build in use...some were awful unless you like smudgy graphics...

Another one to mention is softmaker free office... generally excellent , small and fast with a goood reputation for compatability.

mike