AbiWord
AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word.

Multi Platform
Enjoy your favorite Word Processor on the operating system you like to use - be it Windows, Linux, QNX, FreeBSD or Solaris.

AbiWord has been designed to integrate perfectly with the operating system it runs on. It will take advantage of the functionality provided by the system, such as image loading or printing capabilities.

Interoperability
What use is a Word Processor when you can't share your documents with your friends? AbiWord is able to read and write all industry standard document types, such as OpenOffice.org documents, Microsoft Word documents, WordPerfect documents, Rich Text Format documents, HTML web pages and many more.

Advanced Document Layout
Give your document that professional, scientific or fun-to-read look using AbiWord's advanced document layout options. Use tables, bullets, lists, images, footnotes, endnotes and styles to enhance the way your document looks.

Internationalization
Since not everyone in the world speaks the same language, AbiWord comes in many different languages. AbiWord is available in most common and many not-so-common languages.

Make sure your document contains none of those nasty spelling errors by using AbiWord's built-in spelling checker. Dictionaries exist for over 30 languages.

AbiWord supports right-to-left, left-to-right, and mixed-mode text. This means that in addition to supporting European languages, AbiWord supports languages like Hebrew and Arabic as well.

Mail Merge
Do you also hate writing tens of thousands form letters by hand? With AbiWord's Mail Merge capabilities, you can let AbiWord automate that job for you. Special fields inserted into a template document can automatically be replaced with data coming from a variety of sources, such as Relational Databases, Comma Separated Text files or Tabbed Text files.

To facilitate the use of AbiWord in a server environment, a powerful command line interface to AbiWord is available. This allows you to generate form letters, print documents or convert documents to any file format AbiWord supports - all from the command line!

Extensible Plugin Architecture
The main AbiWord program is very small and requires very little resources to run. This allows AbiWord to be used on systems that are not considered "State of the Art" anymore, which comes all too quickly in the IT world.

Our plugin system was designed to give AbiWord all the functionality you might expect from a modern Word Processor. A variety of plugins can be used to extend AbiWord's functionality, ranging from Document Importers to a Thesaurus, Image Importers and a Text Summarizer.

Copyright © 1998-2005, the AbiSource community. All rights reserved.

http://www.abisource.com

Grand Dad

The AbiWord project has announced that NLnet is providing funding to facilitate the development of improved OpenDocument (ODF) filters in AbiWord. This will increase the program's compatibility with the format and boost its interoperability with OpenOffice.org (OOo).
http://uwog.net/news/?p=22

The latest development release is version 2.7.6. Development releases are aimed at developers, or people willing to test unstable software. They should not be used in a production environment.



Here's the Changelog; and the Release Notes;

The Download page.