The article can be found in Yalm Magazine 06/2009 - here is a link to the pdf.
First of all the writer (Ralf Hersel – rhersel@yalmagazine.org) urges to say that he by no means pretends to have written a conclusive and final verdict. It is his personal interpretation based upon a more or less random observation, of course.
He had a look at Abiword version 2.6.6 and OpenOffice.org writer version 3.0.1 on Ubuntu 9.04.
The article is written in a nice and easy way, giving a score for each task or feature that he had a look at. In order to test the abilities he used a letter that he recreated in each of the two word processors. That is a simple and good test that I will certainly reproduce in my reviews.
Remarkable enough he “lets” Abiword be the winner of his small comparison, even though he concludes that in his test they end up equally interesting and that he could have continued giving points for a long time.
Here are the points he gave:
| Abiword | OO.org Writer | |
| Load time | 1 | |
| First visual impression | 2 | 1 |
| Changing the default font | 1 | |
| Help documentation | 1 | |
| Creating a header in the test letter | 1 | |
| Creating a table | 1 | 1 |
| Creation of a numbered list (layout) | 1 | |
| Creation of a numbered list (numbering) | 1 | |
| Alignment | 1 | |
| Saving the Document | 1 | 1 |
| Selecting text for more than 1 page | 1 | |
|
Total : |
8 | 7 |
Ralf concludes by writing that he realizes that the result of his comparison might be surprising to some, as OpenOffice.org Writer is the more complete product of the two. But on a day-to-day basis Abiword can stand a comparison as it is easy to use and loads fast.