AbiWord

This is possibly the best word processor that works on FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, MacOS X, and a lot of other platforms. All the features of Word Pad + more!
Includes a spell-checker, full fonts menu, zoom capabilities, colored text, .doc compatable, etc. And its FREE as in FREEDOM!

AbiWord looked promising to me, since it was relatively small and supposedly fast. Not everyone wants or needs a full-blown office suite like OpenOffice or MS Office.

AbiWord has a few too many frustrating quirks, though. There is no help file, but instead, it simply directs the user to the AbiSource web site. Despite claims of compatibility with MS Word files, it opened my Word docs with mangled formatting and considerable data loss. A good many files wouldn't open at all, and even caused the program to crash.

I'm not saying AbiWord should be as full-featured as something like Word or OOo Writer, but I had hoped for a little more consistent performance and a little better utility.

I got AbiWord 2.4.1 on 1/5/2006, hoping it would put page numbers on a play I'd written. Jarte does it, but only on printout, I believe. So, I was looking forward to AbiWord. The play is only thirty pages long, and I didn't think it would be a problem on my Windows 98 SE with 256K RAM and a 160 GB drive. Wrong! I could not import my play as a DOC file, an RTF, or even as TXT. AbiWord crashed all three times. When I loaded a single page file, no problem. But if you're trying to get some real writing done, AbiWord may be a disappointment.