my opinion of Abiword, including suggestions for improvement

Hi all, this is my first post here. I talked with Marc Maurer about
Abiword, and he suggested I posted my suggestions to this list. Let me
start with a thank-you for the developers for developing Abiword.

I really appreciate the light-weight-ness of Abiword, it takes half the
time of Open Office to start up. Not only is it faster, but it's good to
see that Abiword has also received more attention for usability and
GNOME integration than Open Office. IMO Abiword has a lot of potential,
but unfortunately the inferior support for MS Word docs and OpenDocument
is a serious problem for me. I understand implementing support for those
is a bit complicated, but when I opened a huge report in .doc in
Abiword, it was unreadible, while OpenOffice imported it with reasonable
quality.

I have a few suggestions for improvement as well.

First, the zoom level of Abiword. This - http://www.xs4all.nl/%
7Evanlonen/openoffice.jpg - is a screenie of OpenOffice on my box.
compare this with this - http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Evanlonen/abiword.jpg -
Abiword screenshot. In OpenOffice the zoom is at 100%. In Abiword, the
zoom is at 150%, which is too big in my opinion. If I set it at 100% in
Abiword, it is to small, it's smaller than OpenOffice at 100%. While
100% in OpenOffice is OK for me, 150% or 100% in Abiword both aren't
nice to work with. Maybe this isn't such a serious problem and should I
get used more to Abiword, but I'd like to see the default zoom level in
Abiword more comparable to OpenOffice zoomed at 100%.

Second, the aids for displaying the page margins. Please look at the
links to the OpenOffice and Abiword screenies I gave above. OpenOffice
has thin gray lines which display the page margins. I think that would
be a nice feature to have in Abiword as well.

Third, since the recent upgrade GNOME's Bugzilla -
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ - is very pleasant to work with. I think it
would be a good idea if Abiword would switch to GNOME's Bugzilla.

Greetings,
Sander van Loon a.k.a. F for Fragging
Received on Thu Jan 26 17:20:52 2006