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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture I took the plunge, downloaded and installed AbiWord, and added in the UK English (my default) and Latin dictionaries. The latter is labelled "Latin (Renaissance)" in the language selection options, and, while I've not tested it very extensively, seems to have some serious limitations - it did not like the form "arma", for example. As to the i/j and v/u issue, for "major" it suggests "maior", but for "uirumque" it would have "virumque". I tried it with Martial 1.47 and 5.9, which I happened to have in a Word file. In the first, it did not like the word "vispillo", in the second it objected to "languebam", "aquilone", "gelatae", and "febrem". So it seems, like all wordprocessor dictionaries, limited but not entirely useless. One can, of course, add words to the dictionary (though since spelling checkers [spilling chequers?] of this sort tend to rely on simple matching, the more words in the dictionary, the lass like lea well bee an accurate result). Otherwise, AbiWord looks to have some possibly useful features, and seems to load fairly quickly with the full plug-in package installed, so may be a good choice for someone wanting a Word-compatible wordprocessor, especially as it seems to be available for many platforms. The user interface under Windows will be largely familiar to Word for Windows users. It is also not a large download - 8.5 MB for the Windows installer package (5.6 MB), plus the Latin and UK English dictionaries (about 1.2 MB each), and the additional plug-in and tools packages. This has the advantage of being downloadable even of slow connections, which OpenOffice clearly is NOT. Fully installed under Windows XP, it occupies about 66MB (50 for the main programme, plus 8 each for import and export tools, and other plug-ins), so would be good for those with limited available space. As to conversion, while it has its own format, it was able to save a document with footnotes in the current MS Office .docx format, which Word opens without complaint, and the same in OpenOffice's Open Document format (with OO 3.1.0). It was able to open Word 6.0 and Word 97-2003 documents - again fairly basic formatting, with footnotes; however, it did not display the footnotes in a .docx (Word 2007) format file created in Word. It does not have anything like the range of compatibilities of OpenOffice and modern Word versions. On the other hand, it seems more stable than OO. Terrence Lockyer Johannesburg, South Africa ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html