Salix Forums

i can open docx files with abiword in wind*ws. why can't i do in salix? in "open file" dialog, there's no "docx" format. thanks for help.

Because it requires a plugin that Salix does not ship Abiword with, and which you cannot even download separately from the Abiword website for some reason. It might be available in the Abiword source code, not sure.

I ran into this issue yesterday. Personally I would recommend just using LibreOffice, since Abiword's support for DOCX has always been awful anyway in my experience.

(And mind, it really irks me that DOCX is used so often in academia, usually to insert completely needless graphics that DOC would support anyway.)

Abiword is also available from slapt-src / Sourcery, and who knows, maybe that version has the plugin! I imagine you may need to uninstall the existing abiword first, if you want to try, and if it works, blacklist abiword in Gslapt so it doesn't revert to the stock version when you upgrade your packages.

Failing that, if Libre is too slow on your system to work with comfortably, you could just use it to convert the file format to .doc or even Abiword's own format, then use Abiword to actually edit or read the document.

antiword has the same issue - it's fine with .doc, but not .docx.

thanks for replies. i once tried downloading the source and compiling it, but took like forever. so i decide to just install libreoffice as safe choice, although i miss lightweightness of abiword .

I've tried building a package from the source tarball just to discover that the docx plugin wasn't included. However, the package from http://repository.slacky.eu (with the docx and a lot of other plugins included) worked fine for me (salix lxde 13.1).
There might be dependency issues, of course. I didn't have any, but I may have installed required packages earlier.
As you probably know already, abiword's rendering of docx files is far from perfect (and neither is LibreOffice's). But I blame MS for that - docx is a terror (as is Apple's .pages format).