Abiword is a lightweight cross platform open source Office program which runs nicely on Linux, probably a little quicker than two of the major applications which are also available, Open Office and LibreOffice. It is twinned with the Abicollab
project which allows multiple participants to work on the same document.
It comes with a useful array of tables, bullets, lists, images, footnotes, endnotes and styles with other features including mail merge & internationalisation.
It also has an extensible plugin architecture with a variety of plugins ranging from Document Importers to a Thesaurus, Image Importers and a Text Summarizer.
It can accomplish a wide range of tasks in document handling, for example it can import WordPerfect documents or graphics, view SVG graphics and work with Palm database files.
A large choice of file types is supported, including PDF which makes it ideal to use in conjunction with Print to PDF for Firefox, you can open web pages you have saved to PDF for further editing in Abiword if necessary.
In addition, it can read and write files in its native form, MS documents,
including MS Word 2007 Office Open XML (DOCX), PDF, OpenOffice, LaTeX,
KWord, PostScript (PS) and Outlook mail.
AbiWord
offers a simple text editor where you input formulas in LaTeX format
for equation handling, and it features a powerful drop down styling menu
accessed from the format
toolbar, in addition to the Stylist, a facility to quickly change parts
of the current document.
It can be used
in a server environment thanks to the powerful built in command line
interface which enables you to generate form letters, print documents or
convert to any file format from the command line.
With features like these and the cross platform functionality including a portable version, Abiword is becoming a must have for the Linux desktop. To install it, first enable nux-dextop repo
Disable it or set priorities for it, then use as below.
$ sudo yum -y --enablerepo=nux-dextop install abiword
Should get you the latest binary version installed
$ abiword
will run it.
See Fluxbox key bindings for Fluxbox shortcuts.
Labels: Abicollab, Abiword, Centos 6, RHEL
