If anyone wants to take up a native implementation of the project,
that would be great.  However, I do believe that for those seeking
instant gratifaction, GTK will build and run on BeOS, using an
X server for display.  This would enable quick checking of the
back-end of our code, if the BeOS port wishes to use BSD Unix-like
semantics for file I/O, etc., while allowing work on the functionality
in the GUI.  This won't be a completely painless road, since there
will be some util/ porting going on.  Of course a real port would
use the native BeOS API for display, file I/O, etc.  Just
something for the interim.
But I suspect an X server, GTK+, and EGCS would at least get
AbiWord running and usable.
-- Shaw Terwilliger