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Latest news entries
AbiWord 2.7.5 Released!
This is starting to get boring, as I'm turning the planets into freshmeat. But let's just pretend we have some actual users that care about this news: there is another AbiWord release! With improved printing support (landscape printing actually works again, how 1992!), working copy/paste on Windows, and improved OpenDocument support, this seems like a very nice development release. We're inching closed to 2.8.0 every day.
[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]
I have a release addiction
Crashers and non-WYSIWYG behavior are so last week.And another one: AbiWord 2.7.3 Released!
We just released AbiWord 2.7.3. The most visible addition to this release is the return of our Maemo support (packages were already being built I was told). Also AbiWord will now be able to gracefully handle and repair a bigger set of corrupt documents. Finally we fixed a bunch of crashers while working towards the next stable release.
[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]
AbiWord 2.7.2 Released!
Just released AbiWord 2.7.2. This release adds support for uppercase, lowercase, and capitalized character styles, and comes with a Windows release.
[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]
2009-05-11
Fridrich is awesome, and I released AbiWord 2.7.1
First AbiWord Development Release: v2.7.0
We've just released AbiWord v2.7.0, which is the first development release towards our stable v2.8.0 release. Changes include Annotation/Comment support, Smart Quotes, Multi-Page View, true SVG/WMF support, use GTK Print in favor of the deprecated gnome-print, improved collaboration support, tons of import/export filter improvements, and more...!
Some first reactions are in: "Ohhh, it's pretty!" - unnamed source, "It's so innovative!" - unnamed source, "I want one for my kids!" - unnamed source, to list a few. Go get it to see what the people are talking about (free copies until we're out of stock)!
AbiWord 2.6.8 Released!
Just released AbiWord 2.6.8. This release contains a good number of fixes, most notably fixes to the auto-save function, improvements to the OpenDocument filters (thanks NLnet!) and a good number of memory leak fixes.
[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]
2009-03-03
A lot has been happening in AbiWord land lately. We're close to a 2.6.7 stable release which will include some nice memory leak fixes and a nice set of OpenDocument filter improvements (the first of hopefully a long list of improvements made possible by NLnet).
On the development branch front, people have been working hard on moving our graphics classes over to Cairo. At the moment, we have a different rendering implementation on all of our platforms (Linux, Mac OSX and Windows), but in the future we hope to unify them all into a single Cairo based implementation. The most recent development is making our Mac OSX port build again, after being not available for the 2.6.x series:
AbiWord's development branch builds again on Mac OSX
The rendering is still suboptimal, but with the move to Cairo I hope we can have a fully working OSX version in the not too distant future again.
AbiWord MSVC++ build
Quite often enthousiastic Win32 developers enter #abiword asking us how to develop AbiWord for Windows. When we tell them we use a MingGW/MSYS environment together with an AutoConf/AutoMake based build system, almost all of them respond with: "Eh?! No MSVC project files?", and leave.
This instant loss of potential developers finally annoyed me enough to install a Windows virtual machine in KVM, install MSVC++ Express and start working on a solution for the past couple of days. Fortunately a whole bunch of dependencies are provided pre-compiled on the GTK+ site these days, which work fine with together with the MSVC compiler and linker. This in contrast with the precompiled libgsf binaries on ftp.gnome.org, which make your program die even before it reaches the WinMain()/main() entrypoint. So take it from me and do NOT try to use them in MSVC: it cost me days to figure this out! Since I didn't know the MS toolchain at all, I poked Foddex constantly on IRC, who happily(?) provided a lot help. The result of all the hard work is shown in the requisite screenshot below:
AbiWord compiled by MSVC++ Express
I still need to add all the plugins to the new project file and fix some obvious bugs like the missing toolbar icons. In the process of making the compiler eat all the code, I had to add small hacks all over the place in AbiWord and its dependencies. Nothing that can't be fixed properly though, and I hope to spend the coming days cleaning it all up and submitting patches upstream.
On a totally unrelated note: uber-AbiWord hacker Martin Sevior just turned 50! Congrats dude, and keep on rocking!
AbiWord 2.6.6 Released!
Just released AbiWord 2.6.6. This release finally fixes a really annoying scrolling bug that has been there for ages and, judging by the reports from users, mostly affected Ubuntu users. I think it was a conspiracy.
[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]