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  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] BL3 abiword
  • Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 18:41:11 +0000 (UTC)

I got Abiword working (Steven, could you change 'issue' for the latest version of BL3 to read not BL3.3 but BL3.32 so it will be more clear?)
and tested it out. I downloaded icewm.tgz again and the md5sum does not match what is posted (it does match what I already had). So probably I had the wrong version of bl3.3 and the right version of icewm. (In the meantime my BL3 installation stopped booting with an error about
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, which happened on this same ASUS computer where BL2 had this problem and had to be reinstalled, this being right after I was testing out Xvesa to make sure it did not cause a crash on a single-monitor system - possibly not related but I went back to the old Xvesa just in case).

Abiword and tables:

1. It does NOT import WP5 - it imports WP6-9 (not clear if this is for Windows or also DOS) so I cannot type up something in WP5 and then add extra formatting (columns or tables). It imports T602 (Czech wordprocessor format).

2. I imported an Albanian WORD for Windows document and it had some problems. One long line wrapped (I can live with that). It automatically used Latin2 but with errors. It made a page with three sections into THREE PAGES (header, middle part with columns done correctly, footer).
The header on the first page had the wrong characters for the extended ascii, that on the second page was wrong for the first half and then right for the second half. The first footer was good then bad, the second footer was good. I could read it anyway, with some imagination, but I certainly would not try to edit this sort of mess so I think I am still stuck with Win98 and the WORD viewer.

3. There are no help files in Steven's small version and I found a way to make columns but not tables (with lines around them). James, did you make columns or tables? I need to translate things with tables and preserve the format once in a while.

4. The keyboard navigation is not working well. Alt-o gets me a menu but c won't get me columns. Various other places I had to use the mouse, but sometimes I could arrow down and Enter. I could not do a lot of things without a mouse (such as turn off auto spell-checking button, since spell-checking is not going to work in Albanian). But Ctrl-B and Ctrl-U work for bold and underline (they are not in the menus).

So it is somewhat better at formatting than antiword in some ways, but antiword put the first page on one page not three (though it made three columns into one).

You can set the language to Russian (Russia) but not Russian anyplace else, on the analogy of Spanish (Mexico) or (Spain). You cannot set it to Albanian or Macedonian (which I translate) though you can read the Albanian at least (Latin2 e umlaut). To read Russian presumably I would need to add Cyrillic fonts somehow, using the SW40 cyrillic fonts for X. How? 8859-5 also has Macedonian, koi8-r does not.

On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, James Miller wrote:

On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, sindi keesan wrote:

Does anyone know if the BL3 abiword imports WORD and WP51/DOS tables
properly?

Table yes, WP5 no.


My experiences with tables using Abiword may not be relevant. In any case,
they do not have to do with importing any documents made using Word that
contain tables. But here is what I know about table handling in general by
open source word processors, and some incidental information on it
concerning Word. One major problem with the main open source word
processor (OpenOffice) is that it will not allow table columns/rows to
span pages. Any column or row that extends beyond the page limit simply
gets unceremoniously cut off at the bottom of the page, and that's it
(this is fixed in the OpenOffice 2 branch, btw--due out later this
spring). Trying to insert a 15-page table of this sort into a document
results in a document of one page with a truncated table. People at the
OpenOffice forum were regularly complaining about it butchering tables of
this sort created using Word. Since I was looking for exactly this sort of
functionality (page-spanning table-columns) for a certain task, I decided
to try Abiword to create such a table. I found that Abiword was capable of
creating my 10-page 2-column 1-row table. I saved the document as a Word
file as well, though I found that I was able to work on it only in the
native Abiword format due to the program's sapping my system's resources
(1Ghz Celeron, 512MB RAM) when trying to open and work with the resulting
.doc file. The system handled the document in native Abiword format
slightly better, but not much. I said earlier onlist that I thought
Abiword was still pretty buggy for this reason. I conclude from this that,
for smaller tables in Word format, Abiword may well work for you. Sorry I
can't be more definite.

James
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