word processing.

[stinkoman]

is there a btetr word processor than kwrite? i mean kwrite is dcent, but it doesnt check for grammar errors (e.g. '.?') and i have noticed that with everything i write using linux (even online) you can only do 1 space after a period... anything that can change this?

[elija]

abiword or open office spring to mind immediately

Abiword is much lighter weight, but I prefer OOO

Abiword Linky
Open Office Linky

Both should be available in your repository - they seem to be
fairly common

[daark.child]

Did you mean kword because kwrite is just a text editor. OpenOffice is good and most distros include it on their discs or software repositories.

[Roxoff]

OpenOffice.org is a full office suite, and is feature-rich. You may want to consider the forked version, Go-oo as that contains modifications by some pretty big players in the world of software that Sun tries to exclude from its office baby. Allegedly.

[Manchunian]

Openoffice does it for me everytime. Abiword is nice and fast, but it doesn't import .doc as faithfully as Openoffice. And what I really like about it, really, really, is that I can put a Windows and a Mac version on my usb pen drive and take it with me wherever I go. This means that I can save all my documents in the Openoffice format (rather than converting to .doc or whatever) and be sure that the document I wrote at home on Linux will be exactly the same as the one I open on Windows or Mac, and vice versa. Also, I have some fancy fonts related to my work that in the past wouldn't appear in my documents unless I installed them on the host computer, which isn't always possible. With Openoffice portable, I don't have to do that anymore: I just put the fonts in the appropriate place in the Openoffice folder in my pen drive and it all works! Wonderful! My only criticism of Openoffice is that it's a bit slow to start up and a little on the heavy side.

[cm1967]

I've had the same issues with Abiword. Newer versions are definitely getting better, though.

[Dapper Dan]

We used Abiword for a while, but had crashing problems. OpenOffice is what we use on all our Linux and Windows machines. Love it.

[SkittleLinux18]

I love Open Office. But I have no idea how to use Impress. I've tried several times and can never figure out how to do the things I want.

What is the difference between heavy weight and light weight when describing a program? And how can you tell??

[elija]

The difference is how many resources it uses. How quick the
program runs is usually a good clue.

Start abiword
Start openoffice

See

[Manchunian]

One of the reasons Openoffice is so heavy is because it uses Java. Anything that runs on Java tends to be rather heavy. Azureus, for example, uses considerably more ressources than Ktorrent. If you really want to see this, run the top command and then launch Abiword; then try openoffice. You'll see which is the most cpu-thirsty of the two pretty quickly.