Abelian Toda solitons revisited

We present a systematic and detailed review of the application of the method of Hirota and the rational dressing method to abelian Toda systems associated with the untwisted loop groups of complex general linear groups. Emphasizing the rational dressing method, we compare the soliton solutions constructed within these two approaches, and show that the solutions obtained by the Hirota's method are a subset of those obtained by the rational dressing method.