AbiWord is dumb.

Thanks to the wonders of X11, I'm often not sitting at the machines from which I run graphical applications. I tried running AbiWord on another machine just now. It starts up, its window is displayed all happy and fun, and then it pops up a dialog box complaining about some missing fonts.

I think, "OK, it's all good, it'll just look icky." I mean, worst case scenario, it'll use -misc-fixed-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*, right?

No, not right.

The program EXITS. Just abruptly. What the hell is that? How are you graceful degradation !!

Oh, so get this. It installs its fonts in directory $FOO, and then uses xset fp+ $FOO to add that directory to your font path. HEL-OOO-OOH, $FOO is on another machine, dumbasses!

Some su and scp mucking, and it runs now. This is so utterly lame.