No way to change default "Save As ... " format in AbiWord

[Feathertail]

Binary package hint: abiword

AbiWord's default .abi format is only used by AbiWord. Whether it's an open format or not, this makes it nonportable, and not good for interoperability or archival purposes.

I personally save my documents as .rtf and .odt. Unfortunately, I have to go out of my way to select these formats from a long drop-down menu each time, because there's no way to change the default "Save As ... " format in AbiWord. I would very much like it if this were not the case!

I am using AbiWord 2.6.4 on Ubuntu Intrepid 64-bit.

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Thank you for your bug report. This bug has been reported to the developers of the software. You can track it and make comments at: http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=12021

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Wrong bug

[Hubert Figuiere (hub)]

It is WONTFIX upstream anyway.

You can still do that by editing the config files as explained here:
http://www.abisource.com/wiki/FAQ/Always_save_as_Word

However it is strongly discouraged.

[N (nord899)]

Hubert,

Nothing personal, but as a rule, whenever I use something other than Word, I expect the native format to be RTF. And so, I thank you very much for the line to the wiki for the ability to change the default save to something other than what probably is a very nice open source Abi Word "ONLY" format. I changed the info to RTF from the Wiki instead of DOC, but sitll. much appreciated.

If you wouldn't mind explaining why you "strongly discourage" people to make this change I would appreciate it.

Tks,

[Feathertail (feathertail-deactivatedaccount)]

N,

I believe the response that I saw in the Abisource bug-tracking tools was that they could not guarantee 100% formatting integrity with any other file format. And so, rather than putting a note in to remind people of this, they decided to not even give the option of changing the file format.

I would like to second your distress on the matter, and to suggest that this matter is important enough to usability that we either pressure the upstream further or create a fork of AbiWord for inclusion in the Ubuntu packages. The way that things are right now seems silly and condescending, and is not acceptable.

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Thank you for taking the time to make Ubuntu better. Since what you submitted is not really a bug, or a problem, but rather an idea to improve Ubuntu, you are invited to post your idea in Ubuntu Brainstorm at http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ where it can be discussed, voted by the community and reviewed by developers. Thanks for taking the time to share your opinion!

[Dominic Lachowicz (domlachowicz)]

That's quite correct - we can't currently guarantee 100% formatting or semantic integrity with any other file format, though we of course strive to make our file filters as complete as is possible. If and when our RTF or ODF filters are good enough to round-trip documents with no dataloss, we'll happily reconsider our decision.

In order to better serve its users, if Ubuntu would like to change the default file format to RTF, ODF, or any other format that AbiWord supports, it would only need to change 1 line of code. If users would like to change the default file format, they may do so via editing a simple configuration file. Instructions for doing this are linked from Hubert's comment.

As a maintainer, I'd rather hear that "it's 1 extra step to save this as RTF" than "I hit save, and now my [annotations, lists, tables, whatever] are missing or corrupt. You've just cost me several days of work." At least with the former, you know that you're doing something a little out of the ordinary. The latter violates the principle of least surprise.