Linux Word Processing

This document discusses the document processing software that is available under Linux. Word processing software has been a matter of great interest for those that wish to see Linux more widely adopted for use in business.

There is a fairly sizable assortment of free software packages for this purpose. Unfortunately, they are not generally considered to be terribly "credible" particularly they do not generally read or write the data formats used by Microsoft Word, which is widely considered the "industry standard." Furthermore, many projects to build "free word processors" tend to get started, but, unfortunately, few ever reach any degree of completion.

There are, in contrast, a number of proprietary software packages that do a reasonable job of "understanding" various proprietary word processor formats.

This document also includes an opinionated discussion about word processing. I feel that the actual thing that people wish to do (doing stuff with documents) is not generally well understood and that peoples' expectations and use of word processing software is hence impeded.

 

Linux Development Projects for Free Word Processors

Here is a list of various projects that have been trying to build word processors. The list is ordered based on what I perceive to be the level of "stability and continuing development" of the package. If it is stable and/or under active development, it will be near the top of the list.

Defunct projects are listed at the end. I will continue to include information on defunct projects even though web presences may have disappear to demonstrate how prone this area has been to failure.

Despite being inactive, I consider EZ. worth using as it is stable, well-designed, and fairly easy to use. And it uses (underneath) a text-based markup system.

The experimental packages are certainly not stable, and all too often lock users into using "proprietary" data formats. As a result, I'm rather dubious of their use.

It would be pretty neat if a Linux Software Foundation/Linux Development Project put some serious effort into one or another of these; I rather suspect that all decent word processing software that is ever produced will continue the current trend and come from proprietary vendors.

Most of these packages are also listed at the Scientific Applications for Linux SAL- Office Software - Word Processing and Publishing page, Linux Applications and Utilities Page, with the somewhat unfortunate resulting duplication of effort.

AbiSource - AbiWord

AbiWord

This is a Gtk-based Word Processor/Publisher system, being "open source" developed, formerly under the "AbiSource License," but now under the GPL...

... [Abisource has] released AbiWord AbiWord is available on both Linux and Windows, so everybody can share files. We have support for WYSWYIG printing on both systems. We also support line spacing, paragraph spacing, widow/orphan control, multi-column documents, find/replace, and infinite undo/redo. Of course, we have everything you would expect such as selections, font control, and cut/copy/paste.

AbiWord looks to become the GNOME Project word processor. It is starting to shape up quite well. By using GTk, it gets any configurability that come from GTK Themes such as GTKstep.

Its capabilities are a bit primitive in comparison with Word, but it is quite suitable if you are writing letters and reports that do not require great sophistication.

KWord

KWord - KDE Office Word Processor

KWord is the "official" word processor of the KDE Project.

OpenOffice.org

Originally based on the source code of StarOffice , the OpenOffice.org "office suite" includes a word processing module that can read and write documents in some of the "industry non-standard formats" that people get quite interested in.

Flwriter

Flwriter - a word processor based on FLTK

Ted

Ted, an easy Linux Rich Text Processor

EZ

CMU Andrew Project - AUIS

The Andrew Project, a joint venture project in user interface design between IBM and Carnegie Mellon University, along with various other participants, includes a "document editor" called EZ that can be used for various purposes including word processing. Its claims to fame include that documents can be safely sent thru email and that documents can combine text,pictures, and in fact spreadsheet data, and the user interface changes dynamically to reflect the operations that are meaningful for whatever kind of document component you're working with.

Unfortunately, it's not particularly compatible with non-Andrew software, and I think it unlikely that this will change.

Status: It's been released in roughly current form for several years; substantial enhancements do not seem likely as this was a piece of joint research work between CMU and IBM on user interfaces, and the designers have moved on to other work. Version 8 is available in source code form, and may soon become readily available for Linux. That appears to be the final edition of the package unless someone decides to fund continuing support.

In /etc/profile and/or other profile files that set up environment for users, add the following:

ANDREWDIR= /usr/local/andrew; export ANDREWDIR PATH=${ ANDREWDIR}/bin:$ PATH export CLASSPATH=$ ANDREWDIR/lib/atk LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ ANDREWDIR/lib/atk:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Lyx

LyX's home page

Lyx is a GUI'ed nearly-WYSIWYG system for creating LaTeX documents. It isn't fully capable of reading and providing visual presentation of arbitrary LaTeX documents; since there's a really powerful macro system inside, that's a pretty intractable problem.

Status: Released; works fairly well. Lyx GUI Independence Status describes what parts of Lyx work with what GUI toolkits; there seem to be fairly equal portions working with GTK, Qt, and XForms .

SIAG Office - Pathetic Writer

Pathetic Writer is a system written using C and Scheme that is part of the SIAG (Scheme in a Grid) Office system.

Status: Somewhat sporadic development; see NEWS .

Many Moribund Projects