ambitions of Abi-word

Hi guys,

First and in advance I would like to apologize for my limited language
abilities. I’m not used to write English texts. I’m Dutch, so most
likely I will make lots of mistakes. I don’t mind being corrected
however ;)

I’m looking for a good alternative for MS word and Excel (for Windows
XP). I’ve used OOo (also the latest version 2.0) for over a year now.
Undo I must say that Writer and Calc have improved a lot in this year,
it still doesn’t apply to my wishes. I’ve invested a lot of time
rebuilding visual basic macro’s from my Word and Excel documents in Calc
en Writer but the handlers they use are buggy and a not really stable.
As far as the text editor concerns I have to be able to mail merge
between a spreadsheet and a text editor. OOo should be able to do this,
especially with the improvements in 2.0 but sadly OOo keeps crashing or
hangs and sending bug reports doesn’t seem to help a lot (I've tried
several times). I’m not trying to devaluate the efforts of the OOo-team
for I think they are doing the best they can. However more and more I
get the feeling the code gets bigger and bigger by adding end of pipe
solutions in stead of getting the basic code right. So I've started
again searching for a alternative solution and stumbled upon Abi-word
and Gnumeric. I think the basics of both programs are fine. Using them
gives me a good feeling. But at this moment they do not yet have the
basic figurers need. I don’t mind waiting, but I would like to know if
I’m waiting for nothing.

I would very much like:
- a roadmap for Abi in general, so the ambitions are Clair to everybody.
What are Abi-Words ambitions?
Furthermore I would like to know:
- if a mail merge with Gnumeric (and/or Excel and/or Calc) is one of the
future goals? If so, do I have to think in monds, years or decennia?
- will Abi support scripting in the nearby future? Can Abi use the
things that will be developed by Gnumeric for this purpose? Do both
projects collaborate on this issue?
- will get Abi a better support for import graphics? (also import for
SVG-inkscape?)
- way can’t Abi handle big documents? The program itself uses less
memory than Word or Writer so that can’t be the problem.
- will Abi change the default document format to ‘odt’ like OOo did?

Well that’s all for now. A lot of questions for a newbie… I know. If
somebody could shine some lite on the issues I would graeathly
appreciate it.

Thanks!

Robby
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Received on Wed Nov 16 20:03:49 2005