> This question may offend some, but I just have to ask it. > > Background: > While advocating the virtues of Linux to my wife, I convinced her to > start her term paper on AbiWord (about 2 years ago). By the third page > of her paper, everything crashed in AbiWord and it was simply incapable > of typing more than 2-3 characters without some serious display problems. >
Hardly surprising - 2 years ago AbiWord was pretty immature. It's a lot better now... > I'm looking for experiences with Kword and it's ability to perform on > large papers. Feature-wise, I have never managed to migrate past what > Word 4.0 offered, so I'm not looking for much. Actually nothing more > than what HTML offers would be fine as far as page layout. > What's really important is the integrity and stability of the > application and it's ability to handle large documents. > Also -- Spelling? Is it reasonably mature? I heard some bad things > about Star Office so I won't introduce her to that one. My experience of KOffice is that it's not too bad - KPresenter in particular is excellent - but StarOffice is significantly better for word processing. I have not managed to get StarOffice 6.0-beta or OpenOffice working under Debian (segfaults during the install) but 5.2 works quite well. It's ugly but at least it seems to by WYSIWYG. Current AbiWord is probably also a better bet than KWord. KWord doesn't seem to be WYSIWYG yet (which apparently is a feature of Office that users like). I believe this is an objective for the next release of KOffice. I find all the current Office-type offerings grossly inadequate compared to LaTeX, but I'm guessing that this would not be a viable option for you :) - Daniel -- ****************************************************************************** * Daniel Franklin - Postgraduate student in Electrical Engineering * University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia * [EMAIL PROTECTED] ******************************************************************************
