Is there anyone working on a port of abiword, or open office? We need that cross platform applictions to do things at different places, for example, I'd like to work on my morphos (or my miggy) and save it to be read at work, even pesent it. We got to make the push towards this. The writers (word processors) being developed now should accomodate this feature. i remember using voyager and going to various sites (msn, ESPN) they would redirect, to a page which displayed a chart of sort saying the rest of the world uses 92%
and this is you like 8% or something, time to upgrade, then there would be a crippled feature to go on....I always hated that! point is 4.0 has abiword, and we don't...I would pay for the ability to use a program both at home and at work

btw i do use final writer, but i never could get that ghostscript feature to work therefor converting the doc into a pdf file, I'm thinking that could work for now if it could be read on current win computers.

can this be done on morph? and how? i assume there are a few options on doing this huh?

[ Edited by xyphoid on 2008/8/25 14:32 ]

Abiword for OS4 is not native port but works through a X emulation layer. This deeply sucks.

Abiword is designed to be mostly plateform independant. The GUI source files need to be completely rewritten to take advantage of MUI. This is a lot of work.

Maybe someone enough skilled will take over this (big) job. A version working from Aros to Morphos would be great for sure.

Bounty ?

Czk

Hi xyphoid,

Your question is really very interesting. A good word processor is the software which misses a lot on Amiga Systems.

There's a port of Papyrus done since some years, unfortunatly, this port was never debugged. It was sold during a little time and there's some copies on the world.

To get Abiword on Morphos, you have 3 ways to do it.

1- The clearest, more faster and more integrated on AmigaStyle is to compile the Abiword core program easly to MOS and rewrite all the GUI cause the GUI is X-11/GTK dependent.

2- The other way is to compile the Abiword core program easly to MOS like on the first solution using GUI warpper. The Warpper should have the job to redirect the GTK features redirected to the MUI ones. This solution need a good GTK/MUI warpper and we dont have a 100% working GTK/MUI warpper at this time. We must dont forget the fact creating the Wapper is a very big job.

3- The last way is the easyest way, but it is the slowest and non elegant .
If you compile the Abiword core program to MOS like it exists at this time, you can run it if you have a X-11 server.

This X-11 server will start every time you run a X-11 dependent program like Abiword, the Gimp or other linux stuff. This X-11 server opens a new desktop on a new screen with all the Unix GUI (gnome, KDE...). Then, Abiword can open on this screen with the Unix windows and features like if it was on a Unix system. This way is close to emulation, but is faster than emulation. This solution create application no able to comunicate with Morphos stuff. This is like a box closed. To do Copy/past operations between This applications and Morphos applications is very difficult and maybe impossible. The printing system is very difficult to implement. There is a lot of limitations to this solution.

This was the way taken by OS4 to run Abiword. The same method was done on Macos to get OpenOffice on a first time. Now open office uses the MAC GUI.

IMHO, we need a good word processor and if Papyrus is realy dead, It would intelligent to create this X-11 alien environement to survive until a good port/creation is done.

Maybe we will get the messi on this projet.



NoWined

[ Edited by serge on 2008/8/26 8:13 ]

My hopes are rather on increasing online capabilities of the system and thus eventually the option to use online office services like Zoho Office, ThinkFree Office or buzzword.

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Yes, this is a very interesting idea. Unfortunatly, we have to do a lot of work on Net stuff. I'm afraid about missing Java machine for Amiga/morphos.

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And how do you do when offline ?

Local software is still a must have IMHO.

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Yes you are write, but we need something working, so if we have to use a net solution, this is better than nothing.

My best whish is to get a polished, debuged
papyrus port, unfortunatly this seems to be most a dream than reality.

[ Edited by serge on 2008/8/26 19:21 ]

@serge

we need something!! there is google docs, but again not sure if our current browsers can direct us there. I know ibrowse doesn't not aweb(whatever happended to apl dev?)
a pdf converter wouldn't work either huh? since you cant write to it while viewing

@serge

we need something!! there is google docs, but again not sure if our current browsers can direct us there. I know ibrowse doesn't not aweb(whatever happended to apl dev?)
a pdf converter wouldn't work either huh? since you cant write to it while viewing

Currently Sputnik is not able to handly any online office solution. All other MorphOS compatible browsers are moot in this regard anyway.

I just realized that final writer can import and export files as .rtf(rich text format). This gives it recognition to word and it gets picked up and opened as the document you typed. It also looks great on open offiice (better i think) the only draw back is that it cant do the graphs or pics, tables in the doc.
If this application could be improved then this may be one solution to this problem. i surfed and only found a ver1 of the arexx port, but if it was improved, then it would be great!

here are a couple of links
http://www.pidcock.co.uk/rtf/index.html
http://www.pisle.com/amiga/fw5.htm