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Old 24th Nov 2017, 16:12
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Mac the Knife

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Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Cape Town
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Ableword - a hidden PDF pearl

I always needed a PDF editor/WP, and tried most of the Adobe clones (I can't afford the proper Adobe stuff) and they were mostly a ripoff, always wanting you to cough up more money for an add-in essential for proper functionality.

Quite by chance, I stumbled on Ableword; AbleWord the Free Word Processor and PDF editor

What a little pearl! Works like a charm! Clean interface, easy to use. Personal dictionary. And completely free!

"AbleWord is a very capable word processing application that can read and write most popular document formats including PDF's. It is fully featured, supporting image formatting, tables, headers & footers and includes spell checking and print preview functions. Best of all it is totally free even for commercial use"

Site is clean, according to ScamAdvisor and AVGThreat.

No SHA hash unfortunately, but mine was clean as a whistle - just scan the executable first with your favourite AV (you do do that anyway, don't you . . .)

No official support for non-Eng-US dictionaries but (from another site):

"To enable British-English spell check:
1. Download English dictionaries for Apache OpenOffice - here: http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/...che-openoffice
2. Open the downloaded file: dict-en.oxt with an archiver (eg. with free 7-Zip) to extract its content and, after that, replace the two files: en_US.aff and en_US.dic located in the AbleWord dictionaries folder (eg. CProgram Files\AbleWord\Dictionaries) with the two files from the extracted archive: en_GB.aff and en_GB.dic
3. Restart AbleWord and.. voilą!
Note: AbleWord can use only one dictionary at a time - from what I gathered - so prepare for the juggling the dictionary files if you edit texts in more than one language.

I can recommend AbleWord as a free, efficient and lightweight replacement of MS Word, OpenOffice Writer etc. Can open/edit/save doc and docx (MS Word formats) as well as odt (OO Writer format) files with no trouble.
And it's ability to edit PDF / convert PDF files to Word is really impressive - AbleWord can do it often better than a commercial software."


Enjoy!

Mac

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