Is AbiWord a stable word processor?

earlclick · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2002 Posts: 34

I've been trying to use AbiWord for months now but everything I do makes it crash. (opening documents, cutting and pasting text, spell check, typing large amount of text, etc) I thought it was just me, so I have to ask everyone here...Is Abiword stable?

surak · Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2002 2:37 pm Post subject:

I've never really had what you described happen to me and for the most part it works well. The only major problem I've had is it'll crash if you try to print or print preview if you compiled it with the gnome USE flag. Also the line spacing is somewhat inconsistant. I wrote a paper for school in the linux version, then transfered the file to the windows version of abiword to print. In Windows (with the same size line spacing) the essay was about a half page shorter, but was normal if I used 2.1 line spacing instead of 2.

earlclick · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2002 Posts: 34

I'm glad that it's usable for someone. To be honest, I've never been able to get as far as printing since the longest I've been able to keep it open is about 10 min. The worst part is that when it dies, it just disappears. No error message, no warning, nothing. Just staring at the desktop background. The worst part is that this is 1.0.2. Shouldn't all 1.0 releases be stable?

dioxmat · Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2002 3:26 pm Post subject:

mmm, never had any problems...
never tried to print though :)
I had to tweak it a little to use my true type fonts, but thats all. never crashed, even when importing large ms office documents...
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mat

earlclick · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2002 Posts: 34

dioxmat · Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2002 3:48 pm Post subject:

duron 650 with 512mb ram (dont worry, abiword didnt use that much)
I dont remember the size though (and dont have any ms documents nearby :) ... everything compiled with gcc 2.95.
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surak · Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2002 7:51 pm Post subject:

If you're really eager to get abiword working or find out what's wrong, try testing it out with precompiled binaries from other distros or try compiling it with different USE flags. All I can say is it works fairly well for me, and it's really bizzare that it acts like it does on both your machines

earlclick · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2002 Posts: 34

Please don't take the noob title near my name on the board literally, I've been back and forth with linux (and abiword) for a long time. I've used Redhat 6.2, 7.2. Mandrake 8.2, Debian even FreeBSD 4.2. The one constant I've found over the years is that Gnome and KDE office apps are crappy. Really crappy. Oh, they've gotten better over the years, but as compared to some of applications that I consider rock solid (gimp, mozilla, xmms); abiword, kword and staroffice are painfully bad. I only posted this on gentoo as opposed to slashdot or kuro5hin because they tend to be a tad emotional there. I wanted to see if there is anyone that would start up abiword and start banging away on her/his masters thesis, business proposal, party invite, what have you, without giving one thought to when or if abiword will crash. Sure I could tinker with Abiword and get it to work, but I don't remember tinkering with mozilla to get it to work. I didn't tinker with gimp. I shouldn't have to tinker with abiword either...
Just my $0.02

surak · Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2002 10:23 pm Post subject:

Sorry I didn't mean to insult your experience as a linux user or anything

But I completely agree with you on the quality of open source office software . This is probably why WINE and CodeWeavers products are such a big hit. Word processors are serious tools, and one has to rely on them to get the job done. You have no idea how many times I've stayed up to 2am working on papers only to have AbiWord bork out on me while printing or spellchecking. Recent updates (1.0+) have made it work better, and I actually feel comfortable using it as my fulltime word processor. It takes a lot of work to make a strong, solid and free program like gimp and mozilla, and maybe koffice and staroffice just don't have all the resources to make a solid product. AbiWord seems to be getting very close to that point, but not quite there. I understand there's a point when you just want everything to work, but considering AbiWord hasn't hit the bullseye on stability, you may just have to tinker if you want it to work.

Besides, linux is no fun if it actually works! :wink:

earlclick · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2002 Posts: 34

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound insulted. I was just stating where I was coming from. And you make a really good point about running office in WINE. But it seems kind of sad that its getting to the point where its easier to setup wine and install windows applications like Microsoft Office, IE and Quicktime than it is to write it from scratch. Back when I was an undergrad (1996) there were tons of tiny word processors and graphing programs to be used for Mac and PC. Now there is only Microsoft Word and Excel.

SirronD

I have never been able to use abiword because it cannot print. It only crashes. Every new "emerge" I update. I even updated again today. Still the same crash. I would like to know how to make it print without crashing. I've searched thru the gentoo forums but without luck. And the abiword fourms and usergroups only say that it is a problem with my distribution, as it works for other distributions.

There is even a bugzilla report about this in abiword, but since the problem "seems" to only exist for us gentoo users, I don't see them doing anything about it.

Someone (in a gentoo forum) said that they got it to work by compiling after pointing to gnome2. But they never shared how to do that.

So until you can print with it, stay away.

Strange thing is that I could print with abiword when I used Mandrake. Something about the combination of Abiword and gentoo linux. I use OpenOffice.

surak · Posted: Tue Sep 03, 2002 7:44 pm Post subject:

I pointed the same problem out in this thread. Try emerging it without the gnome USE flag (USE="-gnome")

Skreems · Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2002 2:07 am Post subject: No luck

I, on the other hand, have compiled my entire system from the start with -gnome in my USE settings, and AbiWord still dies when saving RTF or DOC, or cutting/copying. There's something not-quite-right about a word processor not being able to copy.

dioxmat · Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2002 9:34 am Post subject:

I'm using gnome in my USE flag and have no problem whatsoever with abiword... didnt try printing however :)

kemical · Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2002 10:13 am Post subject:

eh you could always use openoffice

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Skreems · Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2002 2:36 pm Post subject: Well...

If only OpenOffice would emerge successfully on my system :wink:

arkane · l33t Joined: 30 Apr 2002 Posts: 918 Location: Phoenix, AZ

have you tried openoffice-bin?

I've used that all the time, simply because I don't run GCC 3.2, and well.. it takes a millenia to compile I hear lol

gsurbey

lightvhawk0 · Guru Joined: 07 Nov 2003 Posts: 388

Lol I've never had that problem, i have almost every use flag enabled except for the debug flag and i'm using experimentle glibc patches to enhance performance on my amd athlon 6.

But then again my friend claims that i have the luck of the computer gods!! :wink:

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