The proud developers of AbiWord

Once upon a time, I translated into Hebrew part of the AbiWord GUI and beta-tested it on WIN32 platform.
I ceased to beta-test it when I stopped using MS-Windows 2000 altogether.

Recently, I saw a review of AbiWord in ynet (http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3042644,00.html) and told the AbiWord developers’ mailing list about it.

One of the developers then complained that neither he nor Babelfish understand Hebrew and can I provide a summary of the article?

I provided a summary of the article, which said that it is an excellent word processor, but is not fully stable.

The developers went ballistic. I reached the conclusion that they are very proud of the stability which they achieved during the last few months (and indeed version 2.2.3, the most recent one which made to Debian Testing, so far did not crash on me).

Lacking knowledge of the operational profile which the reviewer used, I could not help the developers pinpoint the scenarios which cause AbiWord to crash when working in Hebrew (if at all). But I did report a bug in handling of modifying Hebrew text by deleting and then inserting Hebrew characters and spaces (bug 8407).

Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities.