AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for typing papers, letters, reports, memos, and so forth.

AbiWord is able to read and write all industry standard document types, such as OpenOffice.org documents, Microsoft Word documents, WordPerfect documents, Rich Text Format documents, HTML web pages and many more.

Features:

• Use tables, bullets, lists, images, footnotes, endnotes and styles to enhance the way your document looks.
• AbiWord is available in most common and many not-so-common languages.
• Built-in spelling checker. Dictionaries exist for over 30 languages.
• Supports right-to-left, left-to-right, and mixed-mode text.
• Mail Merge capabilities.
• A variety of plugins can be used to extend AbiWord´s functionality, ranging from Document Importers to a Thesaurus, Image Importers and a Text Summarizer.

Plugins for AbiWord are available here.

What's New in version 2.6.5:

• Added our first iteraton of an Office Open XML filter. Features supported are: formatted text, formatted paragraphs, page breaks, columns, tab stops, footnotes, endnotes, headers/footers, fields, images, hyperlinks, bookmarks, lists, tables, and text boxes.
• Vastly improved LaTeX export filter, which even supports exporting equations now.
• Fixed a couple of annoying crashes in the GTK frontend, for example when overwriting a file or inserting a symbol.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the correct shaping of glyphs for complex scripts such as Arabic.

View the AbiWord v2.6.5 ChangeLog