These days many governments, companies and individual users are moving to ODF. The AbiWord development team considers support for the Open Document Format (ODF) important for a number of reasons, including long term durability and our interoperability with other products on the market.Improved OpenDocument Format (.odt) support It's worth noting that importing WMF images from Microsoft Word documents will also result in high quality images now, as they too won't be rasterised anymore.Figure 5 shows a document containing a high quality SVG image, which will not lose any image quality when printed. This has been fixed, and SVG images will now look better on screen and in print.

While previous AbiWord releases had the ability to import SVG images, their quality was low. The GTK port of AbiWord has gained proper SVG support in the 2.8.0 release.True Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) support Figure 4 shows various pages of a document shown side by side. This is convenient for users who have large widescreen monitors, or for quickly getting an overview of the document. Also new in 2.8.0 is the ability to view multiple pages side by side.Figure 3 shows that AbiWord finally supports this often requested feature.

While older AbiWord releases claimed to have it on board (there was a preference to enable Smart Quotes), it was never (properly) implemented.

Proper Smart Quote support has been added in this latest release.

An annotation example is shown in figure 2 below. A list of all remarks will be displayed in the footer area on every page if desired.

You can annotate any piece of text with a remark that will show up when you hover over it with your mouse. AbiWord 2.8.0 gained support for annotations, or 'comments'.The collaboration support has been tightly integrated with the new online web service called, which lets you store documents online, allows easy document sharing with your friends, and performs format conversions on the fly. Figure 1 shows a document being edited by three different authors at the same time. For example, it gained the ability to distinguish the text written by different authors using various text highlight colors while collaborating. AbiWord's collaborative capabilities are greatly improved in this release.

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