AbiWord vs. MS Word

[Big Booger]

I am kind of disappointed I just found out about AbiWord a few months ago; I would have loved to have this application around back when I was running Windows 98 on my Compaq Presario with 64MB of RAM. Instead of having to purchase MS Word for nearly $200 I could have downloaded AbiWord in a few minutes (with dial-up) and had a top notch word processing application at my disposal.

With all the features that were mentioned earlier, and the fact that AbiWord is free, there is no question in my mind that AbiWord would make a great word processing application. Even if you already own and use MS Word, AbiWord would make a great companion since it can read and write various file formats. The fact that AbiWord is under 5MB in size really surprises me; I can't imagine such a magnificent word processor being so small. You can download AbiWord from AbiSource.com.

:arrow: The Full Comparison @Flexbeta (http://www.flexbeta.net/main/articles.php?action=show&id=78&perpage=1&pagenum=1)

:arrow: Download Abiword (http://techzonez.com/comments.php?shownews=10257&highlight=abiword)

[efc]

BB, I agree and use Abiword instead of notepad or wordpad. I keep it in my quick launch tray. It loads quickly and does almost anything you might need.

[lynchknot]

can this do Japanese BB?

[Big Booger]

Yes you can type in Japanese. YOu just need to change the font to a Japanese based font like MS Mincho or something like that.

I will recommend you not change the default language to Japanese. Once you do that, at least for me, you no longer see the advanced menus at the top...

I think it is a bug.

[carloc]

BB, I agree and use Abiword instead of notepad or wordpad. I keep it in my quick launch tray. It loads quickly and does almost anything you might need.

I think that Abiword is a very good text editor: it's a lightweight program and it's available for any platform (very attractive for a win/linux user like me!). But it lacks some features, so for complex documents I prefer using OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org).

Indeed using Abiword as a replacement for notepad it's not the best choice for me, because Abiword is mainly designed for editing formatted documents. You should consider Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm) for replacing notepad.