AbiWord 2.3.5

The AbiWord team is happy to announce AbiWord v2.3.5 (aka AbiWord 2.4 beta 2) for your stress-testing pleasure. This release is virtually identical to what will become AbiWord 2.4, but still contains some bugs that might the speed up the greenhouse effect or cause your house to fall over.

Several new features are starting to become available for normal users willing to test them out. We will address two of them in some more detail.

Equation input and rendering

This release is the first that has builtin support for creating equations using the itex language (a dialect of LaTeX) alongside the already existing MathML support. Inserting nicely rendered equations is as simple as typing E=mc^2 now!

While standard symbol fonts can be used to render equations, the best results are achieved when the Computer Modern fonts are installed.

Note that equation input and rendering are still considered to be experimental. We welcome your feedback on this new feature. Unfortunately we could not get equation input and rendering ready for this release on the Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OSX platforms.

Grammar checking

A feature that is available for the first time on the Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OSX platforms is grammar checking for the English language. Sentences that are considered to use bad grammar constructs are marked by green squiggles. For color blind people their shape differs from the squiggles used for marking incorrect spelling.

AbiWord v2.3.x is parallel installable with AbiWord v2.2 so users can try it out without disturbing their stable AbiWord 2.2 version. Binaries for the various supported platforms will be provided as soon as possble. We are very much interested in any bug you may find. Please report these to http://bugzilla.abisource.com/.

While we encourage people to try out this new snapshot, please be aware that is a development snapshot and is not expected to be stable in any sort of way.