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Comment by awill | Hacker News Reader

I really loved AbiWord in the early 2000s. However, the fact that they refused to default to ODF meant I switched away. Who's going to store important documents in a format that only AbiWord can read. Still though, it's got many advantages over the LibreOffice bloat.

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It is not "refused". It is just not a trivial undertaking and with even more limited resources now, it is even less easy.

Just switching to ODF as a default format wouldn't have been a good idea, the difference in data models would have caused problems. I have in mind that to do that we'd have to change the internal model for things like list and tables to not have to convert them back and forth each time with losses.

This is a sad fact of the reality.

BTW one of the glorious hackers from the "LibreOffice side" has implemented a LibroOffice filter to read AbiWord documents.

Very nice to see activity on Abiword. The enthusiasm of the author is evident.

Abiword does have support for ODF, but it could be better. Abiword 3 uses ODF 1.1. At the last ODF plugfest quite some issues were found [1, end of page].

There are now automatic tests than can be run to improve ODF support. The tests can be run from the command-line and give output as HTML [2].

Currently, there is a project underway that makes it possible to run the tests on a public test server which will show live results.

hub asks for tests in his blog post. For loading, saving and rending ODF files, the ODF community can help.

[1] http://odfplugfest.org/2015-thehague/report.html [2] http://autotests.opendocumentformat.org/

There is definitely lots of improvement to do in that area for AbiWord.

There is a long list of bugs from every side.

I loved AbiWord's file format. It was literally a basic html file, so I could confidently store anything in it and know I could read it later, much easier than any ODF.

ODF has many similarities to HTML. HTML has <div>, <h1>, <p>, <span>. ODF has <text:section>, <text:h text:outline-level="1"/>,<text:p>, <text:span>.

Images are also PNG, JPEG and SVG. Formulas are MathML.

Styling uses the same properties as CSS, but the are written in XML instead of using the CSS syntax.

The ODF Essentials book is good introduction to the format. http://books.evc-cit.info/odbook/book.html

I lot of folks I tried to convert to abiword refused because it didn't default to .doc for saved files.

Always liked using Abiword on Linux, but the Windows version seemed quite buggy last time I tried it. IIRC Abiword could read and write in (some) .doc format, though that was not the default native format. Come to think of it, a decade or so ago, access to .doc files was a major reason to use Abiword on non-Windows platforms. It will be good to see it working again.

It can read .doc. Never write. When it writes .doc it is actually writing RTF. A kludge, but this is better than always explaining users that saving as .rtf will be fine. And Word did that for a while part of a feature that was removed in an update. The only things were this didn't work is for some proprietary CMS that supported .doc but not .rtf.

I'm personally not super happy about that, but it is still much better than not doing it.

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