A portable grammar checker

[webfork]

I went about editing the Abiword entry today and found that the program has come a very long way; I really look forward to trying out the collaborative writing tools.

However, I saw grammar checking in AbiWord listed on the PortableApps site: http://portableapps.com/apps/office/abiword_portable lists a grammar checker in AbiWord Portable. Its available under the menu item Tools - Preferences - Spelling and check the box at the bottom, but I think its turned off by default because it doesn't seem to work. It underlines things in green without explanation and without any purpose that I can see.

I post in the hope that I've missed something and in fact the grammar checker works great; I think an adequate grammar checker is one of the main things keeping people attached to Microsoft Word. OpenOffice also has a grammar checker discussed here, but Abiword is clearly superior in terms of size and speed, so it would be easier to pull the non-power users (almost everyone) away from Word.

[guinness]

With the recent discovery that OpenOffice might be changing it's name to LibreOffice permanently, AbiWord might become a top favourite in the word processing wars. OpenOffice/LibreOffice

[webfork]

OpenOffice might be changing it's name to LibreOffice permanently

Very interesting.

[-.-]

thought libreoffice was split from openoffice but both would continue :S
don't see how libre is different than open from what i've seen so far though

[Hydaral]

First OpenSolaris and now OpenOffice.org, Oracle's purchase of Sun has really screwed up some good projects.

[SYSTEM]

thought libreoffice was split from openoffice but both would continue :S
don't see how libre is different than open from what i've seen so far though

Oracle hasn't accepted certain patches of OpenOffice.org because Oracle wants people to actually buy licenses of Oracle Open Office. (Sun Microsystems did the same, though.) I already use three forks of OpenOffice.org - X-OpenOffice.org in my external hard drive, Go-oo under GNU/Linux and OxygenOffice Professional as an installed Windows application. The main page of Go-oo is a good list of most important patches Oracle hasn't accepted.

The Document Foundation has announced that all patches of Go-oo will be merged into LibreOffice, including performance improvements and OpenXML support.

I hope there'll be a portable version of LibreOffice in the future. X-OpenOffice.org is based on original OpenOffice.org and I miss the improvements of Go-oo when I use X-OOo.

First OpenSolaris and now OpenOffice.org, Oracle's purchase of Sun has really screwed up some good projects.

I see. I'm afraid of what will happen to Java and Oracle VM VirtualBox.

[joby_toss]

I still don't get it: is it good or bad this Oracle takeover? For a home user point of view.
Will OpenOffice (or whatever the name will be) remain free to use?
Will the forks be allowed to continue their developing?

[guinness]

I think it will continue to be FREE, but it's a little bit over the top all these "forks" of OpenOffice. Wouldn't it be a lot better to have one excellent Office Suite with everything a proprietary suite would offer e.g. Microsoft Office!

[joby_toss]

No, no, centralization is never a good thing (even if there will be 10 so-so suites instead of a great one)! I hope the forks are allowed to go on.

[webfork]

I still don't get it: is it good or bad this Oracle takeover? For a home user point of view.
Will OpenOffice (or whatever the name will be) remain free to use?
Will the forks be allowed to continue their developing?

I think the analysis at the top will be "Sun got into the mess it was in by giving away stuff for free". What they don't understand is that sort of behavior is what made Java so dominant, and was very damaging to Microsoft's Office and OS dominance via OpenOffice and VirtualBox. These are projects that require 10 years of effort that won't yield the kind of bottom line Oracle will be looking for this year. They need serious gains to show investors that the Sun purchase was prudent, then they can potentially start doing what Sun tried to do with all these open, free projects focused on becoming the standard. One that dictates how technology is going to look in 10 years. Just ask IBM how much money they made off Linux.

[SYSTEM]

OpenOffice.org 3.3 is almost finished. Very likely it'll be released before the first stable version of LibreOffice.

There are two options after the release of OOo 3.3:

1. Oracle keeps the trademarks of OpenOffice.org and continues its development. The developers may or may not continue sending patches to Oracle.
2. Oracle donates the trademarks to The Document Doundation. The foundation continues the development and LibreOffice gets a new name - OpenOffice.org.

Will the forks be allowed to continue their developing?

It is impossible to deny forks from being developed. Current OpenOffice.org code is and will be forever under LGPL that is designed to make sure software will remain free. Freedom includes ability to create further forks.

----

I think Go-oo will become obsolete if all patches of Go-oo continue to be merged into LibreOffice.

It's difficult to predict what will happen to the other forks, especially if Oracle doesn't donate the trademarks. Maybe some of the forks will be halted as well, some will switch the underlying code and other ones will simply continue as if nothing ever happened.

I still don't get it: is it good or bad this Oracle takeover? For a home user point of view.
Will OpenOffice (or whatever the name will be) remain free to use?
Will the forks be allowed to continue their developing?

I think the analysis at the top will be "Sun got into the mess it was in by giving away stuff for free". What they don't understand is that sort of behavior is what made Java so dominant, and was very damaging to Microsoft's Office and OS dominance via OpenOffice and VirtualBox. These are projects that require 10 years of effort that won't yield the kind of bottom line Oracle will be looking for this year. They need serious gains to show investors that the Sun purchase was prudent, then they can potentially start doing what Sun tried to do with all these open, free projects focused on becoming the standard. One that dictates how technology is going to look in 10 years. Just ask IBM how much money they made off Linux.

You're absolutely right.

It was very surprising to see Oracle does this. Before acquiring Sun, Oracle started development of btrfs. I thought (and still think) that btrfs is a good example of open source software Oracle is able to develop, but it seems Oracle is becoming the new AOL (that is, a company which destroys every piece of software it touches - AOL did that to Netscape and Winamp).

[Hydaral]

It looks like Oracle have started their revenue-raising from their acquisition of the OpenOffice.org IP. The Sun ODF plugin for MS Office (now named "Oracle ODF Plug-In for Microsoft Office"), formally free, now costs US$90, with a minimum purchase of 100 licenses (US$9000 minimum price):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice ... pen_Office

Is Oracle the new Microsoft?

[joby_toss]

Ok.
I 'got my conclusion: this takeover is a bad thing and all the signs show it will get even worth.

[webfork]

With the recent discovery that OpenOffice might be changing it's name to LibreOffice permanently, AbiWord might become a top favourite in the word processing wars. OpenOffice/LibreOffice

An article very positive towards LibreOffice and fairly negative towards Oracle.

With organizations like Novell, Red Hat, Canonical, and Free Software Foundation, its no small attack on how OpenOffice is managed. Forking is not common in open projects and should be considered a last resort. I couldn't find anything directly saying OpenOffice or Oracle are crap, but there's been criticism about how its operated since back in '07.

LibreOffice Portable has been discussed over at PortableApps, but there appears to be a wait-and-see approach. Likely it will be a year or more before we see anything solid on this.

[Stephen Leibowitz]

The original post in this topic mentioned that grammar checking was not working in AbiWord. This is what the AbiSource website said:

Note that plugins are not shipped separately anymore, but are shipped in the main AbiWord installer that is available on our download page. Plugins can be selected during the installation of AbiWord.

The PortableApps and winPenPack AbiWord portable packages listed in TPFC are for AbiWord 2.8.6. They left out AbiGrammar and some other plugins. However, PA’s AbiWord Portable Test includes all the plugins. It is a portable package for AbiWord 2.9.2.

I added a note to the TPFC AbiWord entry about PA’s AbiWord Portable Test. I included a link to the online help documentation. I removed mention of the AbiCollab.net collaboration site, as it is no longer available.

The last source code and Linux binary version of AbiWord is 3.0.5, in July 2021. Due to lack of Windows developers on the project, the last binary version for Windows is 2.9.4, in Nov. 2012. The 2.9.x versions are point releases. Links to the 2.9.x changes are here.

I think it would be best for PA and wPP to update their main AbiWord package to 2.9.4 and include all the plugins. To be cautious, they could also keep 2.8.6 as a legacy version, and add the grammar and other missing plugins to it.

The AbiWord team had a concrete need - to integrate a grammar checking feature into AbiWord. The best choice, they felt, was to build upon Temperley et. al.’s successful Link Grammar project.

Note that AbiWord 2.x uses Link Grammar version 4. AbiWord 3.x can use version 5.

The original post in this topic was in 2010. Since then, Google has added grammar checking to Docs. There are other online checkers as well. “Popular grammar checkers are often criticized when they fail to spot errors and incorrectly flag correct text as erroneous.” Some people may want to use more than one checker.