Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar
Tired of document bloat? I gave AbiWord another look because I thought it might be useful for a quick side project a friend of mine suggested (it requires quick-and-dirty creation of PDFs, I know how to make PDFs out of XML documents, and AbiWord is XML-based). It’s still not quite ready for my everyday use (I can create documents that crash it on reload), but I expect it to get there pretty quickly. One feature that impressed me is the ability to save its documents in GZIP-compressed form. While BZ2 is more effective, for text documents the size AbiWord will be creating, the difference is probably negligible, and GZIP is more widespread anyway. I created a document containing a couple of fairly long paragraphs and a lot of formatting and saved it. Then I saved it in compressed form. It was about 33% the size of the original. Nice. It opened flawlessly.
I’m also impressed with its CPU usage. I got the Win32 version, brought up Task Manager and watched AbiWord’s CPU usage as I typed. Even with spell checking on the fly turned on, CPU usage stayed below 2 percent. This is a dual Celeron-366 system, so on slower systems it’ll probably be higher, but just for comparison, I tried the same test with NoteTab. It typically ran between 2 and 5 percent. So, we’re talking a real word processor for the price of a text editor. Nice.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.