AbiWord 2.8.0 Released, Loaded With New Features

Open source word processing program AbiWord has a new release this week that sports several new features and a slew of bugfixes. AbiWord, long overshadowed by OpenOffice.org, is a fine multi-platform application in its own right and the new goodies in version 2.8.0 bring even more to the table.

These days, collaboration is king and AbiWord 2.8.0's new collaborative capabilities are pretty spiffy. Now, when multiple authors edit the same document, AbiWord can tell the writers apart. Each author's text appears in a different color, making it easy to distinguish who's writing what. Collaboration is even easier now, thanks to the new Web service, AbiCollab, which lets users store and share documents online.

If you annotate a lot of documents, then you'll love the support for integrated comments. When you annotate an area of text, simply hover your mouse over the area to see what you've written, or jump to the footer section to see a list of all comments made on that page.

Like to get a bird's eye view of the entire document you're working on? View a thumbnail of all the pages of a document lined up in rows for your picking and choosing convenience.

AbiWord 2.8.0 also has a number of other important upgrades. Much-requested support has been added for Smart Quote, which is now turned on by default and works as intended. There's also support for True Scalable Vector Graphics, as well better support for Office Open XML (.docx)the Open Document Format (ODF).

Finally, the printing system in the GTK port of AbiWord has been completely rewritten, and the quality of PDF and Postscript output has been tremendously improved.

If youy've never used AbiWord before, you can take a tour that highlights all its features, or just dive right in and download the newest version. AbiWord may not get the recognition that other open source word processing apps get, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth checking out for yourself.