Notices

Dear All,
I have been looking with interest at the N810 for some time now, I am soon due to perform reporting duty on the field and, as I am a text reporter, I need something light, semi-pocketable, with basic Internet connectivity capabilities (in my case, GPRS via Bluetooth), and of course text input. The N810 fits the bill better than a netbook and its price is just about right.
However, I do need a basic word processor that is somewhat stable. No bells and whistle other than correct word count (for newspaper limits) is required. Judging that I do not intend to use the virtual keyboard and that I do not intend to import doc files, rather write plain text from scatch and send it over via email to editors in DOC/RTF format, is the current build of Maemo Abiword adequate for this task or would I be forced to install a Debian or Iso mount build to ensure word processing capability? Any other alternative I might consider for the task?

Many thanks!

Imho, yes. But, others may have more to add.

Tim

For such simple task I think it will work.
But, if you plan to work with big documents then openoffice (easydebian) is the way to go.

I agree and disagree with maacruz, abiword works, but sometimes when you're going through the menus it can seldom crash.

Open office is great, a little slow in responsiveness, but very bearable for me.
Also I don't like the virtual keyboard that I have to use with open office since I have an N800, but I assume that with the N810 it would work just fine since you have a slide out qwerty.

I don't think you will be able to do anything serious with abiword as it is by now. Random crashes, crashes when inserting text, crashes when writing too quickly (!).
Openoffice.org will do.
If text is enough, you'll get plenty of text-editors, also.

thanks for your note, debernardis. Could you please point me out to alternative maemo-based text editors? I will also try an alternative linux distro, but I might not have enough time to configure everything up, which is why I am happier with a maemo solution.

rzaal: Word count feature is the main problem here. Perhaps you could use a bare text editor like leafpad (in the Extras repository) to do the editing, and use the "wc" command to count the words in your text file. In a terminal:

dantonic: Perhaps you should try OpenOffice 3.0 in my Mer image file. It uses the standard OS2008 virtual keyboards (hildon input method) instead of the Matchbox keyboard.

I haven't tried the current Maemo port of Abiword, but based on the reports I've seen it seems very prone to unexpected crashes. I can't imagine using it for any critical work, especially if you're going to be on deadline.

If all you need is plain text and spell checking isn't required, you may not need to add anything to the N810. It comes with a basic notepad called "notes". By default, it saves documents as html, but it will allow you to save them as unformatted plain text. Once you've saved a file, you can open a terminal window and use the wc -w command, as Qole mentioned, to get the word count.

Another option might be Notecase, which does have a word count function. It is a tree-based editor/manager, which could be quirky for your purposes, or it might offer some advantages. In brief, all your text would be saved in a single file, but each report could be a separate node. You would "export" the current report to send it in. And if you need spell checking, there is a commercial version that includes it.

Notecase is what you are looking for, imho. That's the one I was using for writing my papers before openoffice was available, is very stable and has also desktop versions for several platforms, including linux and windows.

Get the latest version, 1.9.8, at http://notecase.sourceforge.net/