AbiWord was originally started by SourceGear Corporation as the first part of a proposed AbiSuite but was adopted by open source developers after SourceGear changed its business focus and ceased development. It now runs on Linux, ReactOS, Solaris, AmigaOS 4.0 (through its CygwinX11 engine), MeeGo (on the Nokia N9 smartphone), Maemo (on the Nokia N810), QNX and other operating systems. Development of a version for Microsoft Windows has temporarily ended due to lack of maintainers (the latest released versions are 2.8.6 and 2.9.4 beta).[4]
The macOS port has remained on version 2.4 since 2005,[5] although the current version does run non-natively on macOS through XQuartz.
AbiWord is part of the AbiSource project which develops a number of office-related technologies.[6]
Features
AbiWord supports both basic word processing features such as lists, indents and character formats, and more sophisticated features including tables, styles, page headers and footers, footnotes, templates, multiple views, page columns, spell checking, and grammar checking.[7] The Presentation view of AbiWord, which permits easy display of presentations created in AbiWord on "screen-sized" pages, is another feature not often found in word processors.
Interface
AbiWord generally works similarly to classic versions (pre-Office 2007) of Microsoft Word, as direct ease of migration was a high priority early goal. While many interface similarities remain, cloning the Word interface is no longer a top priority. The interface is intended to follow user interface guidelines for each respective platform.
Collaboration
AbiWord allows users to share and collaborate on documents in a similar manner to Google Docs, using a system known as GOCollab.[8] Users can collaborate using a varitety of different protocols including TCP and XMPP,[9] and formerly over AbiCollab.net, a web based service that facilitated collaboration between users.[10]
The AbiWord project includes a US English-only grammar checking plugin using Link Grammar. AbiWord had grammar checking before any other open source word processor, although a grammar checker was later added to OpenOffice.org.[7] Link Grammar is both a theory of syntax and an open source parser which is now developed by the AbiWord project.
