AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks. AbiWord has a similar user interface to Microsoft Word, intended to ease migration for new users. The interface is intended to follow user interface guidelines for each respective platform. AbiWord is packaged with several import/export filters, including Rich Text Format, HTML, OpenDocument and LaTeX (export only). Plug-in filters are available to deal with many other formats, notably WordPerfect (wpd) documents. The native file format uses XML, so as to mitigate vendor lock-in concerns with respect to interoperability and also digital archiving.
What"s new in AbiWord v.2.5.0 (15-Jan-2007) :
* 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 (read full changelog)