AbiWord

AbiWord is a free word processing program under the GPL which runs on Linux, Mac OS, Microsoft Windows, and other operating systems. AbiWord was originally a product of SourceGear Corporation, but SourceGear has since turned the project over entirely to a team of volunteer developers.

It has several import/export filters such as RTF, HTML, Microsoft Word and LaTeX. The native file format uses XML, so documents written with the program are a safe investment from the point of view of digital archiving.

Version 1.0 was released on 19 April, 2002, followed by 2.0 on September 15, 2003. The latest stable and most recent release is 2.0.11 (as of 3/9/2004) for all officially supported platforms. Version 1.0 did not have table support, which meant that Abiword was inadequte for many types of documents. However, it was implemented in 2.0 due to popular demand.

AbiWord contains a BambooWeb plugin to look up an encyclopedic reference for a selected word .