Gary Krakow of MSNBC gives a very nice, positive review of AbiWord, an open source word processor which recently hit version 1.0. “It works on most major OS platforms and supports many languages; it's able to read and write most documents in Microsoft Word's .doc format, as well as twenty others; its authors claim it can do most of what Word can; and best of all it's free. It's been in the works for years, but is AbiWord really that good?”
” Other than that I can report that AbiWord does just it says it does. And, that's a good thing. I use only one-tenth of the available features in any word processor, so for me, AbiWord did exactly what I wanted it to. I've played with the processor in Windows (2000 and XP) plus two flavors of Linux (Lycoris and RedHat) and have encountered no problems whatsoever. I can happily report that documents saved in the .doc format in AbiWord (Linux or Win32) open with ease in Word XP, and vice versa. With the addition of some modules if you need them, AbiWord could easily become your favorite word processor.