AbiWord 2.8 features expanded collaboration

The multi-platform, open source word processor AbiWord was updated to version 2.8 last week, debuting several new editing features, most notably expanded real-time collaboration support. AbiWord's collaboration capabilities are designed to work on top of a variety of underlying transport mechanisms, but the project is highlighting its AbiCollab.net web service, which not only allows peer-to-peer collaboration, but group membership and other social networking features.

AbiWord is a standalone word processor, and thus has significantly lower disk and memory footprints than OpenOffice.org, which bundles word processor, spreadsheet, presenter, and several other office applications together. In fact, it is the word processor shipped by the One Laptop Per Child project on its modestly-powered XO laptops. It is built using GTK, but like most modern applications runs on all Linux desktop environments. The new release was made on October 27, for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Linux users are encouraged to get binaries through their distribution's package manager, or consult the wiki for finding third-party packages.

What's new: vector graphics, annotations, and punctuation education

Version 2.8 introduces annotation support, with which users can attach comments to portions of document text. The annotations are visible as pop-ups when the cursor moves over the annotated text, and can also be optionally displayed in the footer of each page. It also adds a flexible multi-page view, allowing the user to see as much of his or her document as fits on screen — not as a preview image, but as an open, editable session.

AbiWord also supports the use of SVG and WMF graphics inside a document, and now uses the Cairo rendering engine for greatly increased quality — on screen as well as printed. Previous releases converted SVG images on import, resulting in quality degradation. Similarly, according to the release notes, previous versions of AbiWord had a broken implementation of "educating quotes" — the process to automatically convert basic, straight "dumb quotes" into aesthetically curved "smart quotes" — but the feature has finally been fixed for 2.8.

Import and export of other file formats has also improved, including TeX, ODT, the S5 presentation format, and Microsoft DOCX — a project which the AbiWord team mentored a student during this year's Google Summer of Code. The code clean-up that included the aforementioned Cairo support also replaced the now deprecated gnome-print printing library with the preferred GTK Print.

In spite of its goal to remain a lean word processor, AbiWord does support some cross-application features common to full office suites. AbiWord documents can be embedded into other applications with the GTK AbiWidget, and AbiWord can now embed Gnumeric spreadsheets within its own documents. Both features received updates in this release.

Finally, the most talked-about change in 2.8 is the substantial update to AbiWord's collaborative editing feature. Collaborative editing was introduced in the 2.6.x code base, with the ability for two AbiWord instances to directly connect to each other over TCP for a shared editing session, or to connect through an XMPP server. 2.8 marks the debut of a free web service called AbiCollab.net, which functions as a connecting point for AbiWord sessions, and as an online document storage service.

Collaborating with AbiCollab.net

AbiCollab.net provides free user accounts that come with 25M of document storage. In addition to storing the contents, the site retains a full version history that can roll back the document to a previous state. It also supports export to the AbiWord, ODT, RTF, PDF, HTML, plain text, and DOC formats, has a tagging system intended to help users more easily find their documents, and password-protected RSS feeds for monitoring changed files. Users can create a blank document on the site, upload an existing document, or activate AbiCollab.net sharing on an open document from AbiWord's Collaborate menu.

Those features amount to an online storage service, though; AbiCollab.net's real advantage is that it allows real-time collaborative editing without the hassle of directly connecting two applications by IP address. Site users can share documents with other users or make them globally-accessible. Sharing includes a read-only option as well as full read-write permission, on a document-by-document basis.

There are two ways to connect to other users on the site — adding them individually as friends in traditional social networking style, and by group. Users can set up their own groups at will, and group owners can manage group membership and set administration privileges for members. The site is still structured around the documents, however — there are no status updates, profile pages, or other social elements. Preserving privacy is also important; potential friends can only be found through searching as a logged-in user, and every user can mark their account as invisible to searches. Friend requests must be approved by both parties.

The AbiCollab.net server relays changes between two users of a shared document using its own synchronization protocol, not the HTTP connection. Developer Martin Sevior described the protocol as very bandwidth-friendly, and said it was akin to a distributed version control system. As useful as it is, though, there are some limitations. AbiWord cannot simultaneously share a document via AbiCollab.net and over a peer-to-peer (TCP or XMPP) connection.

Competition

Sevior has said that online office suites like Google Office and Zoho are AbiCollab.net's main competition, but he believes that integrating sharing into the local desktop application offers a far superior work experience than that provided by an in-browser editor. AbiWord offers advanced editing features not found in any web application, such as control over margins, tabs, table positioning, footnotes, outlines, and math, he said.

Also, its standard menus and dialogs offer a better user experience than the JavaScript-created menus and dialogs implemented in a web editor — which are often modal, block user input, and can be difficult to activate with the mouse. Finally, he added, AbiWord can handle significantly larger documents without suffering from performance problems, while web browsers begin to struggle with 20 pages or more.

Some free software advocates criticized the AbiCollab.net site launch last week because the source code to the site is not free. Sevior and fellow developer Marc Maurer acknowledged the concern, but pointed out that the service was new. The team would like to find a way to make the site code free, but they also want to investigate ways to use it to raise funds to help support further development. Ideas include offering larger storage space for a fee and building a custom server for business use, but all of the ideas are just brainstorming at present.

In the meantime, it is still possible to use AbiWord to collaboratively edit documents with a peer-to-peer TCP or XMPP connection. The application does not know or care what network transport mechanism is being used; in fact work is well underway to use Telepathy as yet another editing session transport in a future release.

AbiWord has long been a solid word processing choice on the desktop, while Google Docs and other web suites get away with offering fewer editing and formatting features by making document sharing simple. AbiWord 2.8 with built-in real-time editing through AbiCollab.net is an attempt to do both. Whether it will catch on to the degree that in-browser editors have is anybody's guess, but one must not forget that AbiWord has the advantage of being completely cross-platform, which makes it an option for every computer, just like the web browser.