Thursday, April 2, 2009

Abiword for Windows

Abiword is a free and open source word processing program, written using C++ and for a smaller extent C. It is light weight and adapted for use with the One Laptop Per Child system. Abiword runs on many operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS X (PowerPC), Microsoft Windows, and ReactOS. By maintaining its compact size, low memory consumption, and low start-up delay, Abiword is successfully competing with the other well known word processors.

Abiword for Windows is an ANSI application. Porting Abiword completely to Unicode has been considered for a very long time. Earlier researches have been made to maintain Abiword that can be built for both the ANSI and Unicode API. As with the time the earlier versions of Microsoft have become obsolete so that this project targets to port the existing ANSI application to a Unicode only build of Abiword for Windows.

Different issues faced while using the ANSI build will be addressed while converting Abiword into Unicode API. The Unicode application will require Windows NT and the later versions, and for the earlier versions users have to choose the ANSI stable version back to 2.4.6. This Unicode build will use the Multilingual User Interface feature available since the Windows 2000 operating system.

Abiword for Windows Unicode build will need to be tested using the non-Latin text. Unicode only languages and multilingual support will be achieved through this project, while solving many of the issues that were introduced due to the usage ANSI Controls in UI.

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