Software Update: AbiWord 2.7.7

The AbiSource community has released a new development version of what will eventually be version 2.8 of AbiWord. AbiWord is an open source word processor for Windows and Linux. The program is able to open and edit various document formats, including those from Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org and Wordperfect, plus regular RTF documents. Furthermore, the functionality of Abiword can be extended with plugins and dictionaries extensive. Below are the changes made in this release:

Changes from v2.7.6 to v2.7.7 include, amongst others:

• Port thee Cairo+pango based renderer that is used by AbiWord on Linux to Mac OS X. This solves a whole list of longstanding rendering and layout problems that existed in our Mac OS X version. Note that we do not yet provide binaries for Mac OS X, but developers might be interested in looking at the port.
• Allow SVG images to be used as positioned objects, to be copied and pasted, and to be exported to HTML.
• Improve the handling of Smart Quotes.
• Support mail merge fields and page size/page orientation in the Office Open XML importer. Support JPEG images in the exporter.
• Make the equation editor available on Windows again.

The full Changelog can be found here.