FYI: AbiWord abstract for GUADEC-5

[msevior physics unimelb edu au]

Hi Folks,
         Here is the abstract I wrote for AbiWord GUADEC-5  I couldn't
resist putting in some hype. It talks about the feature set
expected by June 2004.

Martin

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The AbiWord project provides the Word Processor component of the Gnome
Office Suite. The project continues to make excellent progress and we are
now the best Free Software Word Processor available. Over the next year or
two we plan to increase this lead and become the best Word Processor
available on the planet.

Highlights of the last year of development include the releases of
AbiWord-2.0 and AbiWord-2.2. Our latest release, AbiWord-2.2, provides
substantial speedups in the loading and editing of complex documents as
well as major new features like: Text boxes, Table of Contents, Stylelist,
Drawing on background images,  many new Table features, improved complex
text (including improved BiDirectional ) support, text hiding between
headings (sometimes called outline mode in other programs), a
sophisticated scripting framework, improved document filters and improved
Revision Marks.

In addition we provide new and innovative features not available in other
programs. These include visual drag and drop of text, image, textbox and
table elements, Visual textbox resizing, and a powerful history and
version feature. This allows changes in texts to be rolled back and
forward between editing sessions. It also allows documents to be compared
and the differences inserted as revision marks. We provide complete
network transparency via libgsf. Documents can be loaded and saved to
anywhere on the Internet. Finally AbiWord provides first page previews of
all document types prior to loading.

As always the AbiWord program continues to provide an excellent user
experience. All the new features are provided via non-modal dialogs so the
user can continue to type and to see the effect of their changes
immediately knowing they can use undo/redo to try different formatting. We
continue to move towards full HIG conformance.

In addition AbiWord-2.2 provides powerful new server features. These
include the ability to provide images of the first page of a document and
to convert Word Processing files to plain text for indexing purposes.

New integration features include the ability to copy and paste tables to
and from Gnumeric and access to the Users Evolution address book and
contact list via the libgda plugin.

As always, AbiWord continues to provide the fastest load in the Word
Processor business.

Looking to the future, we're well on the way to providing a state-of-art
Mathematics support in collaboration with the GtkMathView project. We also
plan to provide complete SVG support.

Finally, the AbiWord project is very open to new developers and helpers.
We are an extremely open and supportive group of people and could use help
in all aspects of the development process. In coding, web page
maintenance, documentation, translations and evangelism.  Although the
code base of AbiWord is large, it is one tenth the size of  Open Writer
and we're an order of magnitude easier to develop for. As a cross platform
application we have many users from diverse environments, including
development agencies in impoverished areas of the world. From their
feedback it's clear that by working on AbiWord we're making the world a
better place.