From: peter@ranui.org.nz
Date: Sat Mar 02 2002 - 05:51:32 GMT
I discovered AbiWord shortly after i discovered Pegasus Mail. Reading
the Abiword homepage moved me deeply giving me the same shivers i
got from the passage from Pegasus's site. (http://www.pmail.com)
"Early in 1990, after tidying it up a little, I made it available on the
Internet at a friend's FTP site in Hawaii, expecting that four or five other
sites might find a use for it... In the first week of availability, it was
downloaded more than 100 times, which also surprised me. I found that
I was receiving mail from people thanking me for giving them
something they couldn't have afforded any other way -- communication.
I grew to understand that communication had to be regarded as a right,
not as a privilege: it seemed to me in 1989, as it still seems to me now,
that freedom of speech is useless if nobody can hear you. Giving away
Pegasus Mail seemed to be a means by which I could try to make
communication more accessible to a much wider range of people who
needed it."
THANKYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU!
You may be pleased to know that we will be using Abiword in a new
community owned and run public IT facility in a poor neighbourhood In
Auckland NZ. Basically we will be providing free access to the Internet
and Word Processing software to people who may well never have
used this technologies before. Its an exciting project that i am proud to
be involved in. (Does anyone know of any other such facilities in the
world?) Our infant site is http://www.ranui.org.nz.
Anyhow, I digress. My off the cuff feedback on Abiword is, well to be
frank, hey guys don't go overimproving it huh! So far it is a very legible
simple user experience, loads quickly, downloads quickly etc.
I like very much that the interface is MS Word compatible, almost
uncanily so. (Im a little surprised MS doesn't have patents on some of
that stuff, eg red squiggle spelling. )
Ok table support would be good, and i understand is coming, but text
boxes? OLE spreadsheet insert??, no, forget it. KISS.
The one thing I *would* like is drag and drop editing. That to me is a
basic hallmark of text editing now. And MS have this worked out quite
good, managing the spaces before and after words etc.
Best regards to all involved.
Peter Scott
Auckland NZ
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