Native Abiword 2.8.6 for the Kindle Scribe (and possibly other Kindles)

[kaspar]

For those who are unfamiliar, Abiword is a high quality, light weight, open source word processor that saw its first release way back in 2002. This port was made with the Kindle Scribe in mind, but feel free to try it on the Oasis or anything with an armhf software version and Bluetooth. Let me know if it works on other devices. This port is of Abiword 2.8.6, which is a 15 year old release. I used it because it uses the same old GTK version as the Kindle.

I think this first release is quite stable, but be sure to save your work often just in case. I left the default font size at 12, but I think 18+ size is much nicer to work with.


Kindle Abiword Alpha 1.0 - July 14th, 2026

Features:

- Get some real writing done on the Kindle
- Native armhf port
- USB Keyboard Support! Kindle provides the 5v power!* It's under Help, USB Keyboard.
- Import/Export .rtf, .doc.
- Custom Fonts**
- Spell check
- Word count
- Copy/Paste
- Make tables
- Refresh the display on demand with the F12 key
- Rotate the display on demand with the F9 key
- Take screenshots on demand with the F2 key (outputs to the Kindle's screenshots folder).
- Probably more things that I'm forgetting
- Get documents off of your Kindle via USB from the abidocs folder, or add documents to edit.

*Tested on 2022 Scribe. Proceed with extreme caution with other models, or use Kindle HID Passthrough (Bluetooth) when in doubt. Do not unplug the keyboard and plug in a charger without stopping the keyboard service first (by going to Help, USB Keyboard, or simply File, Quit). May work on other USB C models, but there are safety checks for the MAX20342 and BQ25611D chips. It won't run if you don't have both. I know the Colorsoft does NOT have these chips. I do not know yet about other Scribe models. This feature is experimental, so please read the dialogs carefully. I would like to add support for more recent models in the future, if I can get my hands on some with jailbreak possible.

**I shipped a font cache with the release, because font cache generation takes about 45 seconds. If you already have custom fonts on your Kindle, or want to add some to /kindle_abiword/share/fonts, you will need to delete the font cache files in /kindle_abiword/.cache/fontconfig. Once you delete those files and relaunch Abiword, it will look like the program isn't launching, but really it's building the new font cache silently. Please be patient. Every launch after that is quick and normal. Please don't try to launch Abiword a second time while this process is working. It will open when the process is complete. It's normal to see your home screen until it launches.

Known bugs:

- Export to PDF works now, but exported PDF documents are image only and you cannot select/search text. That is a compromise for now. I intend to fix it.
- Insert Symbols dialog is too small. I will fix it in the next version.
- Please report bugs. A run.log file is created every time you run Abiword. It resets fresh with every launch, so if you find a bug, reproduce it, then perform a clean exit, grab the log, and post it in this thread.

Install:

Extract. Place the kindle_abiword directory into your /mnt/us/, and the extensions directory (merge or manually grab the abiword folder and place it into extensions for KUAL).

For Alpha 1.0 I am only including support for launching with KUAL. I plan to add Scriptlet support soon.

Notes:

Everything is contained in the extracted /mnt/us/kindle_abiword folder, except for documents. Documents will save into the created /mnt/us/abidocs folder. There is also a dummy folder called abidocs_folder which is used as a work around for a GTK save crash I had to fix. It needs to be there, it is created by the launch.sh on first run, and it needs to stay empty. You don't have to do anything with it, so just leave it alone. For the user, all documents are handled in the abidocs directory.

Be sure to try out the F12 display refresh on demand. Try F9 for screen rotate. Try F2 for screenshot.

You will notice that the words flicker while you type. I think this is for the best, as it produces the best readability once you stop typing. I think you will get used to it, as I have. I will look into selecting different refresh modes in the future.

I’m a big fan of Abiword. I’ve been using it for more than twenty years. It’s one of the first things I install on Linux. I like its purist word processor functionality without the modern bloat.

Thanks to the Abiword team, zampierilucas, kbarni, mergen3107, bfabiszewski, coplate, the Koreader team, and Kindle Modding Wiki.

If you find this project useful, please consider supporting its continued development.

[kbarni]

Thanks, this looks great!

However I encountered some bugs:

- first, launch.sh (or the booklet) won't display abiword. It will run somewhere in the background (as I see the process) but no window is displayed. If I click the scriptlet again, it says Abiword is already running. When running from kterm, I get:

[abiword-launch] launching ./abiword on DISPLAY=:0
Aborted
[abiword-launch] abiword exited rc=134

The "Aborted" line appears about 1 minute after "launching"

- If I start directly ./abiword from kterm, I can see the window (without the toolbar button icons - but this is normal), it responds to touch events, but keypresses aren't registered - they go to kterm. (And the UI is very slow.)

I had other issues too, but first I think these should be addressed, so I'm sure it starts with the correct setup.

I'm testing on PW11 with firmware 5.18.5

Some other observations:
- Make the booklet cover 1.4:1 or 1.5:1 aspect ratio, to have the same size as the book covers (I prefer to use 320x480)
- I think it's an overkill to check the installation at every launch. You can just create a package with a "documents" folder containing the booklet and "kindle-abiword" containing the app (you can add the "extensions" folder for kual). The user just copies everything on the Kindle and it's installed.

[kaspar]

Originally Posted by kbarni

Thanks, this looks great!

However I encountered some bugs:

- first, launch.sh (or the booklet) won't display abiword. It will run somewhere in the background (as I see the process) but no window is displayed. If I click the scriptlet again, it says Abiword is already running. When running from kterm, I get:

[abiword-launch] launching ./abiword on DISPLAY=:0
Aborted
[abiword-launch] abiword exited rc=134

The "Aborted" line appears about 1 minute after "launching"

- If I start directly ./abiword from kterm, I can see the window (without the toolbar button icons - but this is normal), it responds to touch events, but keypresses aren't registered - they go to kterm. (And the UI is very slow.)

I had other issues too, but first I think these should be addressed, so I'm sure it starts with the correct setup.

I'm testing on PW11 with firmware 5.18.5

Some other observations:
- Make the booklet cover 1.4:1 or 1.5:1 aspect ratio, to have the same size as the book covers (I prefer to use 320x480)
- I think it's an overkill to check the installation at every launch. You can just create a package with a "documents" folder containing the booklet and "kindle-abiword" containing the app (you can add the "extensions" folder for kual). The user just copies everything on the Kindle and it's installed.

Thanks for testing! I firmly believe the delay is caused by the massive icons folder in /mnt/us/kindle_abiword/share/fonts. Massive in number of individual files, not file size.

If you wait even longer, I am somewhat confident that the booklet will work eventually.

There was a tradeoff in making the payload a tar.gz for a fast initial transfer to the Kindle vs watching 2,442 items in that folder transfer over at a snail’s pace via USB (as I did many times). It takes forever. But the tradeoff isn’t great because that waiting still has to happen somewhere. This is the biggest problem to tackle right now. Perhaps only 10 icons are actually needed! Maybe less.

The booklet has a failsafe to not launch multiple instances of Abiword because in testing, waiting for this process to complete caused me to execute it several times before it could launch the first time. I think Abiword is also perhaps indexing the icons on first run.

Once that is solved, I completely agree that a more simplified launcher is appropriate.

Regarding icon ratio - I have to say I was rather amused that a square icon worked, and thought to myself that it differentiated between book and application. But I will fix it to follow the standard.

I will get it up on github soon if you'd like to collaborate.

[mergen3107]

Sorry for the nitpick, but is should be “KUAL”, not “Kaul” (at least in the archive name).

[mergen3107]

Kindle Unified Application Launcher

[kaspar]

Originally Posted by mergen3107

Sorry for the nitpick, but is should be “KUAL”, not “Kaul” (at least in the archive name).

Thanks! Fixed!

[mergen3107]

You must be hating me right now (but I don’t mean any harm ��)
You spelt it “KAUL” again…

[kaspar]

Originally Posted by mergen3107

You must be hating me right now (but I don’t mean any harm ��)
You spelt it “KAUL” again…

Well, that's embarrassing. Fixed. In my head I was pronouncing it "call" like "Paul" and that's likely why I kept typing it that way.

Now I will pronounce it "cool" like "dual" !

[kbarni]

Originally Posted by kaspar

I firmly believe the delay is caused by the massive icons folder in /mnt/us/kindle_abiword/share/fonts. Massive in number of individual files, not file size.

The files are already copied, so it shouldn't be a problem. I just start launch.sh

But if Abiword tries to load all the 2k icons at startup, it's possible that it just crashes because it gets out of memory. The PW11 has only 512MB of RAM and mostly full of the OS.

[kaspar]

Originally Posted by kbarni

The files are already copied, so it shouldn't be a problem. I just start launch.sh

But if Abiword tries to load all the 2k icons at startup, it's possible that it just crashes because it gets out of memory. The PW11 has only 512MB of RAM and mostly full of the OS.

So this morning I got the number of icons down to just 182. They are only 856 KB!

I found out that the first launch delay is actually caused by generation of cache files in /.cache/fontconfig/. I may try to deploy Alpha 0.2 with the two files cache files that are generated when only the stock Amazon fonts are present. I had put Times New Roman into my /mnt/us/fonts folder, and Abiword actually picked it up on the first launch cache creation. The combination of both should be a significant improvement.

And simplified launchers.

kbarni, can you load things from KUAL on that system software you're running?

[kaspar]

Here's an Alpha 0.2 candidate. No installer, just the three directories that go in the Kindle user root (/mnt/us/), and KUAL extension directory. The font .cache has been built, so it should load quickly even on first launch. Can someone please test?

[kbarni]

Ok, now it's much faster. I still have the crash, but I managed to find the culprit. If I comment out the line 36 in launc.sh:

export ABIWORD_DATADIR="${APPDIR}/share/abiword-2.8"

it works.So I can finally test the app.

The dialogs aren't working, but I suspect it's because they are defined in the ABIWORD_DATADIR/ui. Note that all the dialog titles need to be modified to work correctly. The "Preferences" dialog crashes the app.

P.S. You can post this on the Showcase channel on the Kindle Modding Community (KMC) Discord server, you'll get more feedback and faster, as it's quite active. You can also have development advice on the Programming channel.

[kaspar]

Originally Posted by kbarni

Ok, now it's much faster. I still have the crash, but I managed to find the culprit. If I comment out the line 36 in launc.sh:

export ABIWORD_DATADIR="${APPDIR}/share/abiword-2.8"

it works.So I can finally test the app.

The dialogs aren't working, but I suspect it's because they are defined in the ABIWORD_DATADIR/ui. Note that all the dialog titles need to be modified to work correctly. The "Preferences" dialog crashes the app.

P.S. You can post this on the Showcase channel on the Kindle Modding Community (KMC) Discord server, you'll get more feedback and faster, as it's quite active. You can also have development advice on the Programming channel.

/mnt/us/kindle_abiword/share/abiword-2.8 is a real directory with all of the UI dialog xml files in it! Dialogs work when launched from KUAL.

I'm having a difficult time getting a scriptlet to work. I updated the main post to include Alpha 0.2 for now.

[kbarni]

I agree that you need the ABIWORD_DATADIR for the dialogs, but it crashes abiword at startup: "abiword exited rc=134" (nothing more in the logs) If removed, Abiword starts - but no dialogs.

Another potential issue: some dialogs are too wide for the PW11 screen - for example on the "Save as" dialog, the OK button is too much to the right.

[kaspar]

Originally Posted by kbarni

I agree that you need the ABIWORD_DATADIR for the dialogs, but it crashes abiword at startup: "abiword exited rc=134" (nothing more in the logs) If removed, Abiword starts - but no dialogs.

Another potential issue: some dialogs are too wide for the PW11 screen - for example on the "Save as" dialog, the OK button is too much to the right.

That's good to know. Thanks for testing. I think I will jailbreak my Oasis 10th gen to investigate smaller screen sizes. I had to manually adjust some of the dialogs for the Scribe's screen (especially the Open dialog which was going off of the screen on the right), but working in percentages rather than pixels might end up being the best practice. I have a PW 7th gen that is jailbroken, but it seems like the last firmware version for it was 5.16.2.1.1 which doesn't have armhf. I think armhf was introduced at 5.16.3! I wish I could hack that version onto the PW7, but it doesn't have Bluetooth anyway.