About
Why AbiWord?
General
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SDI Vs. MDI
Installation
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BeOS Intel
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Basics #1
Basics #2
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The Single Document Interface
AbiWord is a Single Document Interface (SDI). That is,
one AbiWord window can contain only one document at once. If you open
another document or create a new one, a new AbiWord window will appear.
Conversely, closing the AbiWord document will close the document.
This is the opposite of Multiple Document
Interface (MDI) programs, such as Microsoft Word 97,
where all the documents are contained in the
one and only Word window. Closing a document will not
result in closing Microsoft Word.

AbiWord (SDI concept) under Windows
Notice the Windows taskbar
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Microsoft Word 97 (MDI concept) under Windows
Notice the Windows taskbar
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The SDI technology was adopted for AbiWord for two major reasons:
- Since AbiWord is being developed for several platforms at once (Windows, Unix and
soon Mac), it was decided to stress the uniformity of these
versions. Since Unix is based on the single document interface (SDI), that
is what we decided to use. Thus every open document in AbiWord has a button on
the taskbar.
- The most familiar application to users today is without doubt the
Internet browser. Most popular browsers today use the SDI concept. From this,
most users are now used to this concept and less and less
used to the alternative, the multiple document interface.
This reinforces the choice of this technology. Thus,
new users do not have to worry about knowing
how AbiWord works; it works just the way
they expect. So new AbiWord users are not disoriented.
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