Abiword again

I had to sign a document that had been emailed to me. It was a PDF with four pages, each page a scanned image. I printed it, wrote in a few places and signed it, scanned it -- so I had four JPEG images.

I then thought that I would construct a PDF with four pages and those images inserted, so I used Abiword as it can export to PDF.
It worked, except for two very strange things:

1. My PDF is 1.8MB even though the 4 images are 100KB each and the original PDF was 600MB.

2. The PDF appears to only have the first two pages. The last two pages are missing, even though I saved the entire document as PDF. I created the document with four page breaks, so it definitely should have 4 pages.

So, a bit useless. Is it just me? -- whenever I use Abiword, which isn't much, I run into something peculiar. This is version 2.8.6 in Spup.

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Comments

replace abiword by what ?
Username: linuxcbon
We need to find a small word editor but I don't know which. By the way, look at the 10 biggest files in quirky, there is adobe, nvidia, sound library, abiword, gparted, seamonkey etc. I think they should be replaced."17 Jul 2010, 17:19"01727"93.29.60.154'AbiWord pulling tricks"capoverde"Those are some of the typical buggy tricks pulled by AbiWord! Just yesterday I wrote a two-page document with text and three pictures using AbiWord 2.8.3 in Quirky 1.2, then saved it in three different formats -- *.abw, *.rtf and *.pdf. When I opened the *.abw file some hours later with the same AbiWord, the original formatting was gone: there was a third page for a single line that originally closed the second page, the pictures were placed differently etc. When I opened the *.pdf file under Win$ with FoxitReader in order to print it with my laser printer (as it still refuses to work with CUPS), the text was a totally unreadable rubbish! Just for kicks, I tried opening the file with Ghostscript, converted it to *.ps then back to *.pdf: it became normally readable and printable... The only decent AbiWord substitute to my knowledge, OpenOffice, takes more space than all Quirky or Puppy. Some years ago I had tested TED with overall good results, although with a much less pleasant-looking GUI; no idea how it's been developed in the meantime. I remember that some facilities were missing and some operations were a pain-in-the-back -- don't remember if I tried exporting to .pdf. BTW, even Puppy's CUPS PDF-printer does not seem to always work properly. :°("17 Jul 2010, 22:50"01727"93.33.5.110'list"bigpup"Check this list out. Maybe something different could be used. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_word_processors"17 Jul 2010, 23:19"01727"98.91.2.22'how did you create the pdf"disciple"Out of interest, did you create the pdf by using "save as", or by printing to CUPS-pdf, or by printing to the "create a pdf document" thing?"18 Jul 2010, 7:05"01727"123.100.93.238'Re Creating PDF"BarryK"I first created four pages by entering some blank lines then a page-break, three times. Then I inserted a scanned image on each page. It saved in .abw format ok. I used "Save as..." to save as PDF. Username: 18 Jul 2010, 9:15
"01727"114.129.167.148'.docx handling"BarryK"This is missing from Spup 0.4. I have added mime handling to run the 'defaultwordprocessor'. Username: 18 Jul 2010, 9:24
"01727"114.129.167.148'PDF fix for abiword"8-bit"Try this! 1. Open Abiword, and be sure to set your top and bottom margins to allow max usage of pages. 2. Then Insert your scanned pages with a page break after each. 3. Save the document as an Abword document. 4. Then run PuppyPDF to convert the abw file to pdf. The result should be small in size and formatted correctly. Username: 18 Jul 2010, 13:45
"01727"70.56.27.31'Re Abiword PDF"BarryK"I inserted the images floating above the text, locked to the page, not inserted in text. Perhaps that was the problem. PuppyPDF uses abiword to do the conversion. So, I probably could have got it to work if I had messed around a bit more. Username: 18 Jul 2010, 15:11
"01727"114.129.167.148'is what it is"01micko"Hi Lets just say, Abiword is what it is.. I have been on the hunt for a replacement ever since pa_mcclammrock had a bit of a moan about it but there just isn't one. LyX, TeXmacs, way too big and only good for their native format and postscript/pdf. Forget doc, docx with those, although there may be a plugin for LyX, but then why bother? (size)? Unless you need the TeX fonts of course. And let's just say TED is TED! Open office does everything so if you need to [i]work[/i] then why go past that? If you have trouble downloading it, the .debs that magazine companies put on magazine dvd's will work, just need tweaking. I made a tool that can do that.. that's another story. [i]pdfedit[/i] does a good job at creating pdfs from whatever source. It's around 5M, but I didn't compile that, I think it's a Lucid Lynx package we have in Quickpet (Luci-213.. Lucid Puppy 5.1 pre-beta). Yep, just another opinion to throw into the mix.. Cheers"19 Jul 2010, 13:02"01727"115.64.206.145'Workaround"gjuhasz"I think 8-bit found the workaround. I tried the same with 3 pictures in different size and insertion method. My findings: 1.)Abiword seems to write the pdf well (ckeck Abiword's pdf output with ePDFView) 2.)Abiword fails to read the pdf files even if they are correct. 3.) The above is true for ps format. too. However, ps2pdf converts the ps file very economically (abw size: 472 kB, pdf directly from Abiword: 552 k, ps directly from Abiword: 1171 kB, pdf converted by ps2pdf: 92 (!) kB 4.) Depending on the file format selected at save, there can be minor differences (line breaks, etc.,) if one compares the screenshots of files saved and read back by Abiword. Username: 19 Jul 2010, 20:14
"01727"195.56.119.209'GQView = no need using Abiword"charlie6"Hi, 'm getting quite daily such need. Using GQView allows -viewing image file as...jpeg , tiff,... -print them selecting cupspdf printer (if installed) -selecting more files in the left column (keep shift key pressed and highlight using up/down arrow) and print them into one unique pdf file; -configure printing: 1 or 2 or 4 images/page; set the scale to fit; set to center, etc...; adjust the print resolution; print legend/name/ etc... It is fast and reliable. Scanned JPEG file may be - compressed using MTPaint (set preferences with jpeg image quality = 50 and compression factor = 10 - this is convenient for text documents); - as also converted to greyscale (for instance if original is black&white). I have searched to get Xsane scanning straight to black & white (on canon pixma multifunction) without success: scanned documents are at least "greyscale" scanned (depends on the sane driver) resulting in an "heavier" file than a back&white one. Hope this helps. Cheers, Charlie"20 Jul 2010, 23:09"01727"62.88.60.172'Abiword no-breaks"CLAM01"BK, Abiword paginates abw documents and when converting to pdf paginates the same in the pdf. I suspect that adding page-breaks to your abw document made the abw page-breaks double and confused the converter. I work mostly in openoffice now, for smaller stored files and features I use, so I hadn't used abiword for a while, but I tried it in puppy, converting some files to abw and then to pdf, doing WYSIWYG as I used to. I did one 2-page, one 7-page and one 30-page and all converted OK, to pdfs suitable for epdf, adobe and scribus. Try your document without adding breaks, letting abiword do the paginating. See if it works that way."23 Jul 2010, 8:01"01727"75.145.77.185'Abiword'pdf vs CUPS-PDF"charlie6"Hi, I love Abiword [...it assumes I accept and manage with some of its imperfections... :-) ] ...and still resist to switch to that (heavy,fat, etc...) OpenOffice. But sometimes it makes me somehow mad ... for example this: - exporting a 2 pages 37K file (also 2 pages previewed !) to pdf from Abiword resulted in a 3 pages 164K file (got crazy adjusting margins, headers, police size to shrink to 2 pages.....Not helped! - moreover Abiword crashes on each validation of "page setting" ... Aaaargh! ) Then I just tried this: print the 2 pages Abi file using CUPS-PDF printer and : - got a 2 pages pdf file exactly as previewed in Abi...and only 47 k !!! Have fun! Cheers, Charlie Username: 23 Jul 2010, 17:31
"01727"62.88.2.207'export>pdf vs save>pdf"CLAM01"Charlie, I should have noted that I only save-as to convert abw files to pdf. I've never figured out how to export to pdf in abiword, because I never had to. I think abiword saves in a ps or pdf type format, since the files are about the same size. It would explain why abw files would print as pdf directly. Ooo exports to pdf (I just click the button). I don know what odt files are. They are bigger than sxw, which are small for being zipped combination files (xml, I think), which you can extract the text from if you want, leaving all the formatting. "24 Jul 2010, 8:10"01727"75.145.77.185'Blah"fortheumpteenthtime"Just trying to embed a pic in a document, either the wrong revisions keep up showing up, after deletion of the wrong ones one revision I didn't even know of pops up intead and the pic never shows up. Yet another ambitious dead end hobby coding project, forcing more people to stay with the professional crap from Redmond. I wish there would be a small, simple word processor that just works in the real world (meaning on Win). BTW I just tried 10 min. to get over the wonky security queries on this page...keeps saying "all fields are yada go back and yada....not getting many comments eh?"28 Jul 2010, 12:10"01727"80.171.18.94'Focus Bug"Snail"Puppy 431 seems to be the last Puppy version in which it is safe for a new user to even attempt typing in! See discussion here: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=69382 It appears to be a focus bug. I have tried to Google for info on it. In 2000 and again in 2005 similar bugs occurred and were found in my search, but nothing more recent. Those bugs were explained as being due to conflict between Gtk's focus handling and Abiword's own focus control mechanism. They were fixed, at least according to the Abiword maintainers.

RSH update
Username: darkcity
"regarding focus 'bug' - AbiWord is functioning properly, however the focus is on the 'new document button'. that is why tab moves to next button and space opens new doc. -this of course won't be apparent to the user, making it unfriendly to use. Anyway:- ---- RSH has found that AbiWord has a missing lib. I suggest it would be useful for people try reproducing errors they have encountered, but with the fix installed (running from terminal to check for errors) 8) see http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=77122 of course, your error may be totally unrelated - but its worth a shot...

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