Debian Junior Writing packages

AbiWord is a full-featured, efficient word processing application. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks, and is extensible with a variety of plugins.

This package includes many of the available import/export plugins allowing AbiWord to interact with ODT, WordPerfect, and other formats. It also includes tools plugins, offering live collaboration with AbiWord users on Linux and Windows (using TCP or Jabber/XMPP), web translation and dictionary support, and more.

Additional plugins that require significant amounts of extra software to function are in the various abiword-plugin-* packages.

GNU Aspell is a spell-checker which can be used either as a standalone application or embedded in other programs. Its main feature is that it does a much better job of suggesting possible spellings than just about any other spell-checker available for the English language, including Ispell and Microsoft Word. It also has many other technical enhancements over Ispell such as using shared memory for dictionaries and intelligently handling personal dictionaries when more than one Aspell process is open at once.

Aspell is designed to be a drop-in replacement for Ispell.

This package provides a client application to query a dictd server. The client-server protocol is TCP-based; the server may then be local or accessed through the network.

The DICT Development Group maintains several public servers which can be accessed from any machine connected to the Internet. The default configuration is to query one of these servers first. This may be changed in the configuration file /etc/dictd/dict.conf.

Queries may be customized by numerous command line options, including specifying the database(s) to be queried and the search strategy to be used.

This package also provides dictl, which allows using UTF-8 encoded dictionaries with terminals that do not support UTF-8.

GNU nano is an easy-to-use text editor originally designed as a replacement for Pico, the ncurses-based editor from the non-free mailer package Pine (itself now available under the Apache License as Alpine).

However, nano also implements many features missing in pico, including:

• feature toggles;
• interactive search and replace (with regular expression support);
• go to line (and column) command;
• auto-indentation and color syntax-highlighting;
• filename tab-completion and support for multiple buffers;
• full internationalization support.