jamesh  I'm not familiar with the Open Office equation editor although other people have told me that OO.o have implemented some sort of language for describing maths. The Latex equation editor I  wrote for AbiWord is not meant to be the only way enter Maths. Eventually I'd like us to have a full-blown graphical editor like Lyx or MSWord. Ordinary people would definitely get intimidated by having to learn Latex so we'll need something with a shallower learning curve even if it's not as productive.

I'm very comfortable with having Latex as the command-line entry mode. A large fraction of people who need Maths in documents know Latex and those that don't should learn it anyway :-) Since we'll give people instant feedback as they enter their formulas, AbiWord will actually a good way to learn the Latex syntax so users will acquire a transferable skill.

Luis  One of the advantages Apple has over us (and everyone else even MicroSoft) is that they can market their wares to their users right on their own desktop. Right now the big Linux distros have mandated OOo for everyone. It's hard to get a look in at the moment.

Regarding features, I have no doubt that more features => more users (and hence developers). I get the impression people think that we'd need to be as big as OOo in order to have all the features in OO.o.

This is certainly not the case.

Our code base is an order of magnitude smaller now and will not be much larger when I'm comfortable with AbiWord's feature set. This will probably happen by the middle of next year.

That said we're extremely open to good ideas as to how to present these to users. MS Word has taken to hiding menus and burying options in complex dialogs. I'm sure we can do better than that. I'm not very familiar with what OOo has done because I don't use it very much.
If you're interested it is extremely easy to fiddle with the AbiWord UI. Download a tarball or CVS HEAD (for the fun new stuff) build it with the standard, autogen.sh,configure, make etc..
Then in the directory abi/src/wp/ap/xp you'll find the following files which define the main menu:

ap_Menu_Layouts_MainMenu.h
and the toolbars:
ap_TB_Layouts_ExtraOps.h
ap_TB_Layouts_FormatOps.h
ap_TB_Layouts_FileEditOps.h
ap_TB_Layouts_TableOps.h

The ap_Menu_Layouts_MainMenu.h file contains entries like this...

BeginSubMenu(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW)
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_NORMAL)
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_WEB)
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_PRINT)
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_WEB_WEBPREVIEW)
Separator()
BeginSubMenu(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_TOOLBARS)
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_TB_1)
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_TB_2)
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_TB_3)
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_TB_4)
// Currently we only can change toolbars in UNIX builds
#ifdef XP_UNIX_TARGET_GTK
Separator()
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_LOCK_TB_LAYOUT)
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_DEFAULT_TB_LAYOUT)
#endif
EndSubMenu()
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_RULER)
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_STATUSBAR)
Separator()
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_LOCKSTYLES)
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_SHOWPARA)
Separator()
MenuItem(AP_MENU_ID_VIEW_FULLSCREEN)

The toolbar files look like this:

BeginLayout(FileEditOps, AP_STRING_ID_TB_Standard, AP_PREF_KEY_StandardBarVisible)
ToolbarItem(AP_TOOLBAR_ID_FILE_NEW)
ToolbarItem(AP_TOOLBAR_ID_FILE_OPEN)
ToolbarItem(AP_TOOLBAR_ID_FILE_SAVE)
ToolbarItem(AP_TOOLBAR_ID_FILE_SAVEAS)
Spacer()
ToolbarItem(AP_TOOLBAR_ID_FILE_PRINT)
#if defined(HAVE_GNOME)
ToolbarItem(AP_TOOLBAR_ID_FILE_PRINT_PREVIEW)
#endif
ToolbarItem(AP_TOOLBAR_ID_SPELLCHECK)
Spacer()
ToolbarItem(AP_TOOLBAR_ID_EDIT_CUT)
ToolbarItem(AP_TOOLBAR_ID_EDIT_COPY)
ToolbarItem(AP_TOOLBAR_ID_EDIT_PASTE)
ToolbarItem(AP_TOOLBAR_ID_FMTPAINTER)

I think you can work out how to use these. Edit the files as you would guess. Type "make install" and see your own personalized UI. When you come up with something better or something that targets a different market niche let us know. We're very receptive to good ideas.