Abiword tangled up with Wordpad

mirror polisher · 15 Nov 2018

Hello everyone,

I have 2 desktop computers. One is an old XP machine which I don't go online with and the one I'm using right now which has Win 7 pro on it. I took lots of abiword text files and moved them from XP to 7 thinking Wordpad would convert them. Not so.
Now every time I create a wordpad document and save it somewhere it has the abiword symbol over it. If I check the properties of a file like this it says: AbiWord Document (.rtf). Abiword is in the programs so I could just uninstall it but I'm afraid of wiping out a lot of important text.

I'd like to hear from someone else who's had this problem and solved it. Were you able to do all the files in one big swoop ? Thanks for your time ......... Alan

wither 2 · 15 Nov 2018

If you go to Control Panel, Default Programs, Associate a file type..................., what is the default program for .txt and .rtf files?

mirror polisher · 15 Nov 2018

Hi ........ I think it's probably wordpad

wither 2 · 15 Nov 2018

I would go where I mentioned just to make sure. On this system, .rtf is associated with Word and .txt is associated with Notepad.

I never used abiword. What format does it save text files as?

mirror polisher · 16 Nov 2018

The answer to that is in the original question: "AbiWord Document (.rtf). Abiword is in the programs so I could just uninstall it but I'm afraid of wiping out a lot of important text." ........ I still don't know what would happen If I uninstall Abiword which is an old linux based program. It was on very old Ubuntu discs that were free. If you search enough you can probably find it and download it. Maybe Old Apps has it, but I haven't looked.

Barman58 · 16 Nov 2018

Abiword is a standalone free word processor, [it was always free when I last used it many years ago].

.RTF is an old standard file format, [it stands for Rich Text Format.].

Although Abiword will default to using the RTF file format as it's file format [The format is a more complex document format than the normal .TXT format that recognises things such as Bold. Italics, Underline Etc]. Windows comes with a default of its own for reading & writing .RTF files called Wordpad, but other Word processor applications, such as word, will also recognise and open/ save/print these files.

Unless Abiword has changed significantly over the years I doubt that uninstalling the application on windows will do anything to the actual .RTF files, as this is a standard file format and not something that is owned or in any way tied to AbiWord.

If you can backup your existing .RTF files then this would be a good idea, as a general safety measure against you accidentally deleting one. some ,or all the files which is more likely than Abiword being uninstalled is likely to do

You could also select a file in RTF format in the file explorer right click [or Shift Right Click), select "open with" and choose Wordpad or other word processor and select the option to "always use this program to open files of this type" this will set the double click option to open any .RTF file in the application you choose. You can then uninstall the Abiword application or leave it there, [I would recommend this as sometimes different applications will format files slightly differently, so it's useful to have the option to use the creating application if needed

wither 2 · 16 Nov 2018

However, all I wanted him to do is to go where I mentioned in my first reply and check which program is associated with those file extensions. If it's not Wordpad, then change it. The option you mention with Windows Explorer is also there. There's no need to uninstall abiword.

mirror polisher · 16 Nov 2018

Thanks Wither and Barman (sounds like a lawfirm

With all this good information I feel much more confident and will mark this as solved. Best to you both,

Alan

wither 2 · 16 Nov 2018

Your welcome.