Abiword (Pete's notes)

Web to the Abiword home page.

rpm -i abiword-gnome-bidi-1.0.3-1.i386.rpm \ abiword-fonts-1.0.3-1.noarch.rpm \ abiword-clipart-1.0.3-1.noarch.rpm

This installs /usr/share/AbiSuite/clipart, /usr/share/AbiSuite/fonts, /usr/bin/abiword and /usr/share/AbiSuite/AbiWord. There is no man page, so look either at the built-in help or the website.

When I first fired it up, it gave an error window that said my font path contained non-directory entries. When I clicked "OK" it gave another error window that said I had another font problem that might be solved by adding the following to the "Modules" section of /etc/X11/XF86Config:

Load "type1"

I added the line and restarted X. This time abiword still gave the first error but not the second.

To solve the second problem, I followed the suggestion in the window to find the "Unix Font Warning" section of the FAQ on the Abiword website. It said to "manually (and permanently) add the AbiWord font folder to the font server's configuration". To find out where the AbiWord font folder was, I did

rpm -q --list abiword-fonts

The font server is xfs. The xfs configuration file is /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/config. I added /usr/share/AbiSuite/fonts to the font path in the config file and restarted the X server. Abiword still complained at startup, so to turn the warning off, I did Tools->Preferences and in the Preferences Schemes tab, unchecked the Show font worming at start up box.

To switch to Emacs key bindings, edit your ~/.AbiSuite/AbiWord.profile, and find the section beginning with that >Scheme "_custom_". Add the line

keybindings="emacs"

Installing Microsoft fonts
AbiWord has font problems. It complains when you try to print something. When I tried this and got many "Get times new roman !!!!" messages, I searched the web for how to fix them and did the following, which didn't change AbiWord's behavior. Actually, I may have simply created a /usr/share/fonts/truetype when one already existed. Sigh.

Web to SourceForge and get xf86-corefonts. You'll need cabextract and xf86-corefonts.

rpm -i cabextract-0.6-1.i386.rpm rpm xf86-corefonts-0.2.1-2.noarch.rpm rpm -qa --list xf86-corefonts

Then I read the README this showed and did

/usr/X11R6/bin/core_font_install.sh

This puts the fonts in /usr/share/fonts/truetype. To clean up, I did

rpm -e xf86-corefonts

To print, set the command to "lpr -c -Plj22duplex". I got font complaints and bad fonts on the printed page. See the above discussion of fonts.

Pete Siemse

Last modified: Thu Oct 31 18:05:36 MST 2002