To whomever reads this far in the thread with respect to the AbiWord help files: Problem Solved.

I ran an strace to run AbiWord. After opening I pressed F1 to run the top level help file. As jong357 already noted, AbiWord looks for a local copy of the help files at /usr/share/abiword-2.6/Abiword/help. The slacky.eu package installs the help files at /usr/share/abiword-2.6/help.

I created a soft link and then AbiWord found the local helps files just fine.

mkdir /usr/share/abiword-2.6/AbiWord
ln -s /usr/share/abiword-2.6/help /usr/share/abiword-2.6/AbiWord/help

Long term solution: Modify the build script or create a doinst.sh script to perform the above two commands, which I have done.

Caveat, the new directory name is case-sensitive. Be sure to create the new directory as AbiWord, not Abiword or abiword. I did not pay attention to this minor detail and spent a good long 10 minutes staring at my monitor muttering....

Great news! You should inform Robby Workman about this. I believe he is the maintainer of the script.

That's odd. I've installed the docs into /usr/share/abiword-2.6/AbiWord/help and Abiword didn't pick them up as I noted earlier. That's the whole reason I sed the URL --> file:///

Glad it works for someone anyway!!

It's the slacky.eu script that he was talking about so they need to be notified of the error. Robby doesn't even build the docs or plugins I believe. Just Abiword proper....

Ah, alrighty.