AbiWord – Free Multilingual Word Processor for Windows, Linux

Recently, I got a call from a friend who had saved his resume in Microsoft Word format, but who no longer had access to Microsoft Word. As a consequence, he could not update his resume. He wondered if, he could “borrow” my copy of Word to install on his computer so that he could revise his resume. It struck me that he, like many computer users, was unaware of the many free alternatives to Word that are available for download, most of which “save” and “open” in Word’s .doc format.

AbiWord is arguably the best of these in the class that I refer to as, light word processing applications. 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.

As important, AbiWord is able to read and write all industry standard document types, such as OpenOffice documents, Microsoft Word documents, WordPerfect documents, Rich Text Format documents, HTML web pages and many more.

AbiWord has a quite small resource footprint, which allows full functionality on systems that are not considered “State of the Art”.

I find AbiWord with its surprising amount of features and simple straightforward interface, to be the appropriate word processor I need running in the background while I’m on the Internet. As stated earlier, its small memory footprint as opposed to memory hogging Microsoft Word, is ideal for most of my day to day work.

In fact, as you can see from the lead picture, this article was produced on AbiWord.

Quick facts:

• Multi Platform
• Internationalized
• Advanced document layout options
• Tables, bullets, lists, images, footnotes, endnotes and styles
• Available in most common, and many not-so-common languages
• Spell checker
• Dictionaries for over 30 languages
• Supports right-to-left, left-to-right, and mixed-mode text
• The above feature allows support for languages like Hebrew and Arabic
• Mail Merge capabilities

Download at: Abisource

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