AbiWord Portable Launcher
=========================
Copyright 2004-2008 John T. Haller

Website: http://PortableApps.com/AbiWordPortable

This software is OSI Certified Open Source Software.
OSI Certified is a certification mark of the Open Source Initiative.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA.


ABOUT ABIWORD PORTABLE
======================
The AbiWord Portable Launcher allows you to run AbiWord from a removable drive whose letter changes as you move it to another computer.  The word processor and the settings can be entirely self-contained on the drive and then used on any Windows computer.


LICENSE
=======
This code is released under the GPL.  Within the AbiWordPortableSource directory you will find the code (AbiWordPortable.nsi) as well as the full GPL license (License.txt).  If you use the launcher or code in your own product, please give proper and prominent attribution.


INSTALLATION / DIRECTORY STRUCTURE
==================================
By default, the program expects this directory structure:

-\ <--- Directory with AbiWordPortable.exe
	+\App\
	    +\AbiSuite2\
			+\AbiWord\
				+\bin\
	+\Data\
		+\settings\

It can be used in other directory configurations by including the AbiWordPortable.ini file in the same directory as AbiWordPortable.exe and configuring it as details in the INI file section below.  The INI file may also be placed in a subdirectory of the directory containing AbiWordPortable.exe called AbiWordPortable or 2 directories deep in PortableApps\AbiWordPortable or Data\AbiWordPortable.  All paths in the INI should remain relative to the EXE and not the INI.


AbiWordPortable.INI CONFIGURATION
=================================
The AbiWord Portable Launcher will look for an ini file called AbiWordPortable.ini within its directory (see the paragraph above in the Installation/Directory Structure section).  If you are happy with the default options, it is not necessary, though.  There is an example INI included with this package to get you started.  The INI file is formatted as follows:

[AbiWordPortable]
AbiWordDirectory=App\AbiSuite2\AbiWord\bin
SettingsDirectory=Data\settings
SettingsFile=AbiWord.profile
AbiWordExecutable=abiword.exe
AdditionalParameters=
DisableSplashScreen=false


The AbiWordDirectory and SettingsDirectory entries should be set to the *relative* path to the directories containing AbiWord.exe and your settings from the current directory.  All must be a subdirectory (or multiple subdirectories) of the directory containing AbiWordPortable.exe.  The default entries for these are described in the installation section above.

The SettingsFile entry is the name of your AbiWord settings file within the SettingsDirectory.

The AbiWordExecutable entry allows you to give an alternate filename for the AbiWord executable.

The AdditionalParameters entry allows you to specify additional parameters to be passed to AbiWord on the command line.

The DisableSplashScreen entry allows you to run the AbiWord Portable Launcher without the splash screen showing up.  The default is false.


PROGRAM HISTORY / ABOUT THE AUTHORS
===================================
This launcher contains elements from multiple sources.  It began as a batch file launcher written by myself (John T. Haller) and posted to the mozillaZine.org thread about running Thunderbird from a USB key.  tracon later released a launcher called fflaunch which I enhanced and re-released as Portable Firefox.  mai9 later improved on fflaunch's techniques and released it as Free The Fox.  Multiple suggestions back and forth as well as improvements from mai9, myself and others lead to the launcher we have today.  This most recent version adds my methods for allowing the code to be run from anywhere on first launch (as opposed to a specific directory), pass in commandline options, run without an ini file and allow the use of profiles from local installations.