For those of you that find yourselves needing an easy to use, lightweight rich text processor/editor, you might consider trying ted some time:

Ted, an easy Rich Text Processor for X Windows

Generally speaking, abiword is my choice, but it seems to be picking up more gnome-related dependencies all the time, so I've been using ted recently and it's been working pretty well so far. It's not highly polished in appearance (it does have optional GTK support), but it handles rich text very well and that's all I need.