Software Update: AbiWord 2.5.0

The AbiSource community has released the first development version of what will ultimately lead to AbiWord 2.6. Although the open source word processor AbiWord is normally available for Windows, Mac OS X and various distributions of Linux, only the Windows version of the download page can be picked up. It appears that this version is also intended to be used on the next test version of the One Laptop Per Child system, which should roll off the production line at the end of this month. In any case, the changelog of this release looks like this:

AbiWord v2.5.0 Released

The AbiWord team is very proud to announce AbiWord v2.5.0, the first snapshot of the development that will lead to AbiWord 2.6.

This snapshot allows interested developers, testers and users a sneak preview into the future of AbiWord.New features of this release include (amongst others):

• A new Pango based renderer for Unix platforms, improving support for languages ​​such as Thai and Arabic
• Cross platform libgsf integration, allowing the user to open files on remote shares (the last part holds for the Unix platform for now)
• Cross platform Glib integration, meaning less custom AbiWord specific code to maintain
• Support for the Bonobo component framework has been deprecated (Unix platforms)
• Improved the build system to be more standards conformant (for example, “make dist” and “make distcheck” now work)
• Experimental AbiWord GTK+ widget, with accompanying Python bindings
• Various toolbar improvements, most notably the improvements to make them work better on small screens (Unix platform)
• A massive amount of work on all of our popular import and export filters
• A new experimental collaboration plugin (only available on Unix for now)
• A new GNOME Office integration plugin, replacing the old GNOME Office Charting plugin (Unix platforms)
• Improved command line handling, allowing input from standard input, and output to be directed to standard output (examples here).
• Improved printing from the command line, deprecating our old custom postscript driver
• Lots of updates to our translations
• Various Drag & Drop and Clipboard handling improvements
• Improved modularisations for resource constrained devices, such as optional printing and spelling support
• Improved support for running AbiWord in non-UI mode (sometimes also referred to as “server” mode, as offered by the AbiCommand plugin); most notably the requirement for a (fake) X server has been removed.

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