Okay, it’s more like OOwriter VS Abiword…
This is a fairly accurate description of my usual document creation process:
Round 1, FIGHT!
- open Abiword, cuz it’s a lean,
meandocumenting machine. - start writing my document, saving in
abw(Abiword native format) - eventually, require a feature that Abiword does not support (more control of embedded images, for example)
- *sigh*
- open OOwriter
- either
- save
abwfile asrtf,and open in OOwriter, OR - select all text in Abiword, copy, paste in OOwriter
- save
- finish document in OOwriter
- use nifty one-click pdf export button
Abiword:0
OOwriter:1
I should also note another recent displeasure I’ve had with Abiword…
Round 2, FIGHT!
When desperately trying to finish some documentation for a school project, it crashed. Panic set in. Okay, it must have an auto-recovery of some sort, right? It has an auto-save, but it was disabled – was that default?! After Googling for a while, I found something along the lines of “you’re outta luck.” …shit. Open OOwriter….
Abiword:0
OOwriter:2
Abiword: I want to like it, I really do!
I hate both. OO is sooo slow and crashes so often. Abi is so slow and crashes sooo often. Both of their spreadsheet programs suck (lack of basic functionalities).
(I still prefer Abiword, for it has a more intuitive interface.)
For me, it’s Word. Even its default install outdoes OO, at launch and at general performance. Word comes up in about 1.5 seconds, and performs better. I’m not patient, not at all, I need programs to hop to it, and so far it’s been Word that has served me best. OpenOffice 2.x is just gummy alround… everything takes too much time to get going, especially startup.
The only thing I wish Abiword had is a way to make the program honor my choice of display colors in XP. I need white text on black background (eye issue), but I couldn’t set this up in Abiword, except on a doc by doc basis… last I looked, Abiword had no global setting for a white on black layout.
Thanks for the space.
I personally like OOwriter better because of Abiword’s lack of proper font rendering. If anyone has noticed, the cursor sometimes falls behind of the text or is far ahead. Also, the spacing is always bad. Parts of words are cut off or repeated. Abiword just isn’t for me.
Yeh, I’m with you there.
It’s really nice, and then way too soon you want to play around with some columns.
Maybe one day? Or maybe Ooo will just get faster.