AbiWord

Abiword defaults to using Times New Roman as it's default font. This can be annoying if you don't like Times New Roman, particularly if you make a table and have to reset the font in every cell. The solution is to open ~/.AbiSuite/templates/normal.awt with a text editor like Vim or Gedit and replace Times New Roman with the font you like. Or you could do it with a sed. For example, if you like Bitstream Vera Sans and want to use the default (American) template

mkdir -p ~/.AbiSuite/templates &&
sed 's,Times New Roman,Bitstream Vera Sans,' /usr/share/AbiSuite-2.4/templates/normal.awt > ~/.AbiSuite/templates/normal.awt

Bitstream Vera Sans is a nice font but sadly AbiWord-2.4 has an annoying bug. It won't print some fonts in italic and Bitstream Vera Sans is one of the fonts affected. The solution is to use a different (inferior) font. You'll just have to try the fonts you have available and see which ones work.

Trying newer versions

Normally, I wouldn't add information about a development version here, but the 2.4 series includes some otherwise redundant packages in its dependencies, and recent 2.6 has many reports of crashes when attempting to print - IMHO a libxml2 upgrade started this, but there other opinions - and more importantly the developers have no resources for it because they are concentrating on 2.8 (at that time, 2.7.x worked).

Now that abiword-2.8 is nearly here, I've seen an interesting issue with printing (possibly related to gtk+ changes): If the environment variable GTK_MODULES is not set, attempting to print crashes before it gets to the screen listing the available printer queues. This variable is updated all over the place in gnome, so people using a full gnome desktop probably won't see the problem. If you think this problem applies to you, try running it from a term using:

GTK_MODULES=foo abiword

If you are able to print by doing that, you can put the following libne in your .xinitrc:

export GTK_MODULES=fo

Up
Top