openSUSE 13.2 64bit KDE
Printing works from other editors. It will not save in PDF format either. Starting from a console results in…
** (abiword:3560): WARNING **: failed to get find a colord device: The name org.freedesktop.ColorManager was not provided by any .service files
…which is expected since its a monochrome printer.
Any suggestions?
Does anyone on this forum use Abiword under 13.2 KDE? It’s in the repositories.
On 2015-05-25 13:06, ionmich wrote:
>
> Does anyone on this forum use Abiword under 13.2 KDE? It’s in the
> repositories.
I don’t. I gave up on it years ago. I have tried again not long ago and
I was very disappointed, I was unable to read word docs sent to me. I
have to use LibreOffice.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))
I have tried several different versions with the same unusable results. Why is it even in the YaST repositories? If it can’t be fixed shouldn’t it be removed?
And which versions exactly?
Why is it even in the YaST repositories? If it can’t be fixed shouldn’t it be removed?
???
It worked fine the last time I used it (some years ago).
I just tried it out now again (the version that comes with 13.2), and it seems to work fine here. I loaded a (simple) .doc file and successfully printed it to a PDF file (I have no printer connected at the moment).
That is with 13.2 x86_64 KDE4 like you.
I do have GNOME installed as well though, that might make a difference. You might miss some package that’s required for it to work fully.
Judging from the error message in your first post, I would suspect that you don’t have “colord” installed, try to install that.
Not sure if that’s necessary, but if it is and is not installed automatically, you should file a bug report about the missing dependency. The GNOME maintainers (Abiword is part of GNOME Office) might not have noticed this as it is required by GNOME anyway.
I am pretty sure that if I work with Gnome I won’t have a problem, but I have several boxes that only run KDE, and I like consistency. When I try to install colord I get the following…
The following 15 NEW packages are going to be installed:
argyllcms colord color-filesystem icc-profiles icc-profiles-basiccolor-lstarrgb
icc-profiles-basiccolor-printing2009-coat2 icc-profiles-lcms-lab icc-profiles-mini
icc-profiles-openicc-rgb icc-profiles-scp-argyll icc-profiles-scp-fogra icc-profiles-scp-yamma
libcolorhug2 libgusb2 shared-color-profiles
The following 4 recommended packages were automatically selected:
icc-profiles icc-profiles-scp-argyll icc-profiles-scp-fogra icc-profiles-scp-yamma
15 new packages to install.
Overall download size: 4.4 MiB. Already cached: 0 B After the operation, additional 52.9 MiB will be
used.
Since I working with limited room on my netbook I am disinclined to adding this. I will try it and report the results, but I have a feeling that it will not solve the problem.
I am using KDE (only) as written. But I happen to have GNOME installed as well here on this system.
Since I working with limited room on my netbook I am disinclined to adding this. I will try it and report the results, but I have a feeling that it will not solve the problem.
You know, the size of those packages are in the range of a few hundreds to a few thousand bytes with colord itself having 1.5 MiB.
Only argyllcm is a bit large, 50MiB. But this doesn’t seem to be required. Try to use the “–no-recommends” switch to install fewer packages.
If it does not solve the problem, you must be missing something else. It works fine here.
After I installed colord the error is not reported. But when the opened .doc file was modified and saved its size shrank from 24.5kb to 7.5kb. Even though it was saved as a .doc file and named as such, when opened it with Abiword or MSWord it was not, containing strange control-type characters at the beginning of each line. Since robin_listas reported similar problems in a post above I suspect it only works with Gnome.
Thanks for the help and suggestion.
I thought this was about printing?
And robin_listas only reported problems in opening existing Word files with Abiword AFAICS, not saved ones from Abiword itself.
Well, Abiword doesn’t support exporting as .doc apparently. If you choose “Microsoft Word (.doc)” in the Save As dialog, it actually saves it as RTF, but Word should be able to read that just fine.
I just tried that, and the resulting file opened fine in Calligra Words and LibreOffice.
How did you save it? If you just click Save, it probably gets saved in the Abiword format, so no other program can detect the format or open it correctly.
Try “Save As” instead and choose the appropriate output format.
Other than that, I can only suggest Calligra Words. You seem to have it installed anyway.
I am aware of your other thread, and personally I don’t think you will find anything else that will suit you.
It should be possible to “unclutter” your screen when using calligra though. You can disable/close or rearrange all panels as you want.
That’s where it started.
Well, Abiword doesn’t support exporting as .doc apparently. If you choose “Microsoft Word (.doc)” in the Save As dialog, it actually saves it as RTF, but Word should be able to read that just fine.
I was not aware that the .rtf format was compatible with Word. Also since the file size reduced dramatically I thought I had lost something.
How did you save it? If you just click Save, it probably gets saved in the Abiword format, so no other program can detect the format or open it correctly. Try “Save As” instead and choose the appropriate output format.
You have solved my problem. Thank you very much.
Well, it was invented by Microsoft as well (in 1987), and was used as standard file format for other Microsoft applications.
See also: Rich Text Format - Wikipedia
Also since the file size reduced dramatically I thought I had lost something.
Well, RTF probably doesn’t support all features of .doc, and I don’t know how complete Abiword’s support is.
But for text-based documents, it should be ok.
On 2015-05-28 18:56, wolfi323 wrote:
> Well, RTF probably doesn’t support all features of .doc, and I don’t
> know how complete Abiword’s support is.
At least rtf is documented, so support should be better.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))
Well, actually .doc is documented too meanwhile. Microsoft did publicly release the specs a few years ago. 
But as .doc basically is a memory dump of Word’s internal data structures, it doesn’t really make it too easy to support it either.
Anyway, I did a quick test and as I suspected, Abiword does not support graphics at all in the RTF export, so it’s really only an option for text-only documents.
But it’s probably the best way if you don’t want to install Libreoffice (which does have quite good .doc support, both reading and writing, IME).
Calligra doesn’t support .doc export at all as I noticed meanwhile (and .rtf neither), although it can also read it. It does support exporting to .docx though, Microsoft’s (more open) successor to .doc.
On 2015-05-29 14:16, wolfi323 wrote:
>
> robin_listas;2712551 Wrote:
>> At least rtf is documented, so support should be better.
>>
> Well, actually .doc is documented too meanwhile. Microsoft did publicly
> release the specs a few years ago. 
> But as .doc basically is a memory dump of Word’s internal data
> structures, it doesn’t really make it too easy to support it either.
Ah, yes, makes sense.
Ok, then lets say that rtf was documented from the start as it was
designed to be a format for exchange of documents. Or so I believe.
But even inside word, a document loses things when using rtf format.
> Anyway, I did a quick test and as I suspected, Abiword does not support
> graphics at all in the RTF export, so it’s really only an option for
> text-only documents.
Oh 
> Calligra doesn’t support .doc export at all as I noticed meanwhile (and
> .rtf neither), although it can also read it. It does support exporting
> to .docx though, Microsoft’s (more open) successor to .doc.
That’s what the OP should do. His client should use that format instead
of .doc.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)