# AbiWord 2.2 for MacOSX

Introduction
License
Guide

# Introduction

AbiWord is a free, cross-platform word processor. For a quick overview see http://www.abisource.com/tour/.

AbiWord for MacOSX was developed primarily by Hubert Figuiere, with occasional help from Francis Franklin, Dom Lachowicz and Pat Lam. Thanks also to Ryan Pavlik, Remi Payette and Karl Koehler. (Let me know if your name also belongs in this list.) Of course, the full credits list for AbiWord is hundreds of names long...

## Important!

AbiWord for MacOSX is not as complete, well-tested and bug-free as the UNIX and Windows versions, in particular:

- AbiWord's plug-in architecture works now, so the WordPerfect and HTML importers, as well as some other plug-ins, are bundled with this release.
- Textbox behaviour is poor and setting background attributes may cause AbiWord to crash.
- Bidirectional text input has improved, but I'm still not happy with it.
- Various minor (but annoying!) drawing glitches.

No doubt other problems also. Please report bugs at AbiWord's Bugzilla. For the latest developments of AbiWord for MacOSX see fjf's AbiWord page.

## Configuration & Resource Files

With traditional UNIX (i.e., Linux, Solaris, etc.) builds of AbiWord, system and user configuration and resource files are usually found somewhere like:

- system: /usr/share/AbiSuite-2.2/(this varies a lot)
- user: $HOME/.AbiSuite/

On MacOSX these are:

- system: /Library/Application Support/AbiSuite/
- user: $HOME/Library/Application Support/AbiSuite/

## Templates

AbiWord comes bundled with a number of templates. You can create your own, however, and put them in:

- system:/Library/Application Support/AbiSuite/templates/
- user: $HOME/Library/Application Support/AbiSuite/templates/

The default template for new documents is called normal.awt which comes in a number of different language-Country encodings.

## Dictionaries

AbiWord now uses enchant as the spelling back-end, and has plug-ins for

1. Apple's MacOSX dictionaries, which (as far as I can tell) are:
   - Dutch (Netherlands)
   - English (Australia) [Panther Only]
   - English (Canada)
   - English (UK)
   - English (US)
   - French (France)
   - German (Germany)
   - Italian (Italy)
   - Portuguese (Portugal)
   - Portuguese (Brasil)
   - Spanish (Spain)
   - Swedish (Sweden)
2. ispell and the traditional abispell dictionaries: get (be ['Big-Endian'] or ppc) ispell hashes (the dictionary file has the suffix .hash) from the abispell package (see table below) and put them in:
   - system:/Library/Application Support/AbiSuite/dictionary/
   - user: $HOME/Library/Application Support/AbiSuite/dictionary/
   The following table gives links to the abispell downloads on SourceForge.
   Warning: I don't know how up-to-date this list is or indeed how up-to-date the dictionaries are.

LANG | Language name | zip
cs-CZ | Czech | download
da-DK | Danish | download
de-CH | Swiss | download
de-DE | German | download
de-AT | German | download
en-AU | English | download
en-CA | English | download
en-GB | English | download
en-IE | English | download
en-NZ | English | download
en-US | English | download
en-ZA | English | download
eo | Esperanto | download
es-ES | Spanish | download
es-MX | Spanish | download
fi-FI | Finnish | download
fr-BE | French | download
fr-CA | French | download
fr-CH | French | download
fr-FR | French | download
hu-HU | Hungarian | download
gl-ES | Galician | download
it-IT | Italian | download
la-IT | Latin | download
lt-LT | Lithuanian | download
nl-NL | Dutch | download
pl-PL | Polish | download
pt-PT | Portuguese | download
pt-BR | Portuguese | download
sl-SI | Slovenian | download
sv-SE | Swedish | download
uk-UA | Ukrainian | download

## System Requirements

AbiWord for MacOSX is currently developed on MacOSX 10.3, but release builds should work on MacOSX 10.2 as well. (There won't be any version that will run on prior versions, so please don't ask.)

## Help Needed

You don't need to be an experienced software developer in order to help out, there's plenty to do!

- Updating the documentation to reflect changed features or new features. And you could write a tutorial: The Beginners Guide to Crashing AbiWord, or something like that. In fact, are you bilingual? Then how about translating the documentation!
- Making sure that AbiWord behaves the way it's supposed to behave. Those developers, tsk tsk, are always too interested in new features and seldom actually use AbiWord. Someone needs to make sure the users are getting what they're (not) paying for.
- You could compose some new templates...

So, plenty to do, and if you feel like programming then there's even more. Subscribe to the AbiWord Developers mailing list (abiword-dev) and/or join us on IRC (irc.gimp.org #AbiWord) and introduce yourself. Don't be afraid - we're a friendly bunch. Usually...

| This page is Copyright ©2004 the AbiSource community. All rights reserved. AbiSource, AbiSuite, and AbiWord are trademarks of Dom Lachowicz. All other product names, company names, or logos cited herein are property of their respective owners. AbiWord is free software, subject to the GNU General Public License.