Abiword and Gnumeric was: Re: [plug] [link] Linus and the fire-hose

Harry McNally harrymc at decisions-and-designs.com.au
Sun Feb 9 12:45:51 WST 2003


On Sun, 9 Feb 2003 11:55:44 +0800 Cameron Patrick
<cameron at patrick.wattle.id.au> wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 11:05:03AM +0800, Harry McNally wrote:
> 
> | The only addition thus far has been OpenOffice.org on systems
> | with >=128MB memory.    
> 
> Okay, I'm curious... What do you install on less memorable (is that the
> right term?) machines for word processing and/or spreadsheets?

Abiword and Gnumeric

Abiword lacks tables but will work on doc and rtf otherwise.
Gnumeric can operate on Excel 95 files.

Abiword has two bugs that we work around at the moment. If you zoom it
will sometimes close and save the open file as <the_files.name>.CRASHED
This is recoverable by restarting AbiWord and opening this file and SaveAs
the_file.name and working on. We have a recent CompSci graduate who is
working on this and is making progress (Thanks Luke). There is a bug posted
that has been opened and closed, finally closed that should be fixed but my
suspicion is that the developers are all running fast boxes now and don't
see it happening as we do on 200MHz machines. Installed RAM doeesn't matter
which my uninformed analysis may point to a race condition.

The other problem is that the Spell Check (british english .. yay)
sometimes goes straight to the "Spellcheck Complete" dialogue when
some words clearly have the red wiggle below them. It is possble to
RMB select each underlined word and hints are offered at the top of
the list (select to correct word) but it means working manually through the
documant. A pain.

I'm not a heavy user of Gnumeric which is remiss of me. I've been using
OOo for some designs calcs and power budget stuff that ended up in a
spreadsheet.

What I've tried to do is run apps out of the CA distro eg Sylpheed in
my office on the assumption that if I find the apps clunky then I
shouldn't inflict them on other people :-)

All the best
Harry 

-- 
I'm sending back my fridge magnet.
The beer fridge has come off in the post.



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