It's not so farfetched, actually

The Abiword Community Outreach project was wondering about my post from last Friday in which I mentioned that Abiword couldn't handle a messy text file while Microsoft's Notepad (included with Windows) was more than equal to the task. They have, if I'm not mistaken, a vague tone of disbelief, and I suppose that's natural since we are talking about a full-on word processing product versus a trifling text editor barely worthy of the name. But, to answer their question, no, Abiword wouldn't open it as any file type (or rather it did, but refused to display any content--I do wish I had saved a copy of that file, I could go back and look to see which control character it was causing all the problems) while Notepad did so without any fiddling, and actually that shouldn't be such a surprise.

Notepad, for all the slights against it, is a relatively mature product. I imagine it's one of those projects that senior programmers keep around in the back closet somewhere, waiting for a new guy to get hired, and then send him back to look it over and cut his teeth on. Consequently, it's probably been massaged over the years by a lot of people with a lot of minor, but useful features, sort of the way my grandfather used to keep tinkering with his RV in spare moments till it began to resemble the cockpit of a Boeing 747. A friend pointed me the other day to this handy little logging feature it has; I imagine there are dozens of such obscure little parts of it that we hardly ever run across, but that some bored coder over at Microsoft threw in over the years to scratch some itch.

Abiword, on the other hand, has only been around since 2002 and isn't quite ready for production environments just yet. As I mentioned, I use it exclusively on my desktop here at the office and I think it's a good product; on the other hand, as a relatively immature project it is necessarily missing a lot of features. I believe I had also mentioned that I use TextEdit instead on my Powerbook; that's because the OS X verion of Abiword has tremendous performance issues and is nearly unreadable much of the time with display problems. It works great on Linux, but even there it's missing features that I would typically consider required in business environments. I generally recommend Open Office to people who need a free, open-source word processor for production use.

I prefer Abiword myself anyway; I like that it's lightweight and shooting for full cross-platform implementation, and I think they were ahead of their time adopting a standardized plug-in architecture. But it's young, and it's no shame to get skunked by Notepad in a relatively rare and apparently complex parsing problem which Microsoft has had a decade to accomodate.