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Download AbiWord 2.6.5

AbiWord is a free software word processor. The name “AbiWord” (pronounced “Abby Word”) is derived from the root of the Spanish word “abierto”, meaning “open”. It currently runs on Linux, Mac OS X (PowerPC), Microsoft Windows, ReactOS, BeOS (unsupported), AmigaOS 4.0 (through its Cygnix X11 engine), and other operating systems.

AbiWord was originally started by SourceGear Corporation as the first component of AbiSuite, as part of a plan to create a full Office Suite that would be free software. However, SourceGear gradually moved on to other business interests, and now the AbiWord project is run by a team of volunteer developers. AbiWord is part of GNOME Office, a collection of office applications with some degree of integration.

Like most Open Source projects, AbiWord started as a cathedral, but has become more like a bazaar. AbiWord is part of a larger project known as AbiSource, which was started by the SourceGear Corporation. The goal of the project was the development of a cross-platform, Open Source office suite beginning with AbiWord, the project’s word processor.

SourceGear released the source code to AbiWord and a developer community quickly formed around the project. SourceGear has since then stopped working on the project.

The developer community has since then continued to make improvements and increase the quality of AbiWord. Version 1.0 was released in April 2002, followed by Version 2.0 in September 2003, 2.2 in December 2004 and 2.4 in September 2005.

AbiWord is unique among word processors in its drive to become a fully cross-platform word processor. Our source code is carefully written so that AbiWord will run on virtually any operating system with a minimum of time spent on porting. This combined with our support for internationalization (the ability to run AbiWord in many languages) gives AbiWord a massive potential user-base.

Currently we run on most UNIX systems, Windows 95 and later, QNX Neutrino 6.2. We also have a MacOS X native port available. There used to be a BeOS port, but that version has been unmaintained for too long and support for it has been discontinued.

AbiWord Features
* Interface
AbiWord has a similar user interface to classic versions of Microsoft Word, which is intended to ease migration for new users. Although there are differences, the AbiWord developers aim to embrace and extend this de facto standard in business.
With recent changes in Office 2007 user interface, AbiWord becomes a viable alternative, since it mimics the old versions of Word.
The interface is intended to follow user interface guidelines for each respective platform.
* File formats
AbiWord is packaged with several import/export filters, including Rich Text Format, HTML, OpenDocument, and Microsoft Word. An input filter for Office Open XML (docx) is included beginning with version 2.6.0. LaTeX is supported for export only. Plug-in filters are available to deal with many other formats, notably WordPerfect documents. The native file format, .abw, uses XML, so as to mitigate vendor lock-in concerns with respect to interoperability and also digital archiving.

AbiWord 2.6.5 Changelog
AbiWord 2.6 is a multi-platform word processor that combines state-of-the-art usability, powerful features, and excellent interoperability. Furthermore, it features a powerful framework for supporting custom extensions. AbiWord v2.6.5 is the latest stable release, which compared to v2.6.4 contains a good number of bugfixes and a couple of new features.

This release includes the following changes (and more!):

# Added our first iteraton of an Office Open XML filter. Features supported are: formatted text, formatted paragraphs, page breaks, columns, tab stops, footnotes, endnotes, headers/footers, fields, images, hyperlinks, bookmarks, lists, tables, and text boxes.
# Vastly improved LaTeX export filter, which even supports exporting equations now.
# Fixed a couple of annoying crashes in the GTK frontend, for example when overwriting a file or inserting a symbol.
# Fixed a bug that prevented the correct shaping of glyphs for complex scripts such as Arabic.

Note for Windows 95, 98 and ME users: AbiWord 2.6 is currently not available for your operating system. Please continue using AbiWord 2.4.6 instead.

Download AbiWord 2.6.5