Release Notes

Thank you for your interest in this release of AbiWord!

About AbiWord
AbiWord is an "Open Source" word processor. To learn more about the concept of
Open Source, you should look at <http://www.opensource.org>. Because AbiWord is
Open Source, it is freely distributable and available for use by anyone, withou
t restrictions. With AbiWord, there is no need to worry about piracy. We encou
rage you to make as many copies as you like and to give them to your friends and
colleagues.
Note
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that AbiWord is not "shareware". You are under no moral or legal obligatio
pay anyone for the right to use this program. If you are not familiar with
kind of software, please rest assured that there is no catch. AbiWord is f
and it will always be free. It is developed in a public fashion, by member
the software community from all over the world, communicating and collabora
together via the Internet.

Getting Help
There is some documentation at <http://www.abisource.com/support/>. However, due
to the lack of time and people to contribute to the documentation effort, it is
far from complete, and does not cover all features, including many of the new f
eatures available in the 2.x release series. Another, sometimes more useful plac
e to get help is the AbiWord user mailing list <http://www.abisource.com/support
/help/maillist.phtml>. Users are strongly encouraged to join the mailing list in
order to ask and answer questions freely. Please keep discussion limited to Ab
iWord related subjects.
Also, IRC provides a more real time medium of communication, and can elicit more
immediate response, depending on who's online and responsive. See <http://www.
abisource.com/support/help/irc.phtml> for details.
Helping
If you would like to join the community of people who are developing AbiWord, th
ere are lots of ways you can help, even if you are not a computer programmer.
If you are in fact a programmer, and would like to work on the project, see the
developer information on our web site, join the abiword-dev mailing list, and as
k what needs to be done. There are always features or ports which need attentio
n.
Be aware that because the site does not receive too much attention, <http://www.
abisource.com/developers/> is obsolete in some areas and you will probably find
the developers on list and IRC more helpful.
If you are not a programmer, you can still join the AbiWord Developer mailing li
st and contribute in other ways. The easiest way to help is to simply use the p
rogram and report any bugs you find. A tool called Bugzilla is available on our
web site for exactly this purpose.
Contributions can be easily made in the areas of documentation, site maintenance
, quality assurance (bug-checking, a little harder), and product promotion. Wha
tever you're good at, the friendly folks on the AbiWord Developer mailing list a

re perfectly willing to find something for you to help with and there is always
plenty to be done.
We appreciate any help we receive.
Supported Platforms
AbiWord is a multi-platform application, meaning that it was designed to work we
ll on multiple types of computers and operating systems. At the present time, Ab
iWord is supported on Windows NT (Windows XP, Vista, ...), Mac OS (see note belo
w), Linux, a variety of other UNIX-like systems (including everything from Solar
is to *BSD to RTEMS). The BeOS port has been removed from the source tree as of
July 8th 2005, the QNX port as of April 2008. If you can help us with any of th
ese ports or provide and maintain a new one, you are more than welcome to. Other
operating systems will likely be supported in the future.
The AbiWord port to Mac OS prior to OS X (Carbon) has been removed due to the ex
tensive and unmet developer resource requirements. However, the Mac OS X (Cocoa
) port is still under development and according to its maintainer, has reached a
quite usable state, though it is not quite on par with the Unix port yet.
Legalese
Copyright 1998-2009 Dom Lachowicz and other contributors
All Rights Reserved

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under th
e terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foun
dation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with thi
s program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place
- Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
AbiSource, AbiWord, and AbiSuite are trademarks of AbiSource, Inc., in the Unite
d States and other countries. The AbiSource logos and AbiSource product and ser
vice names are also trademarks of AbiSource, Inc., which may be registered in ot
her countries.