2006 Alexander van Loon 2006 Marc Maurer AbiSource Community &legal; Sander Loon, van AbiSource Community

doc-writer2@gnome.org

Marc Maurer AbiSource Community

uwog@uwog.net

MY-GNOME-APPLICATION Manual V&manrevision; &date; Documentation Writer 2 docwriter2@gnome.org GNOME Documentation Project Full title of previous manual. Release date of previous manual. Documentation Writer 1 docwriter1@gnome.org GNOME Documentation Project This manual describes version &appversion; of AbiWord. To report a bug or make a suggestion regarding the &app; application or this manual, follow the directions in the GNOME Feedback Page. AbiWord abiword Abiword &app; is a word processor which is fast, small in size and easy to use. It is able to save and open documents in a large variety of file formats. &app; is similar to most other modern word processors. To allow older systems to run &app;, a plugin system is used to keep the size of a basic installation of &app; small and to reduce the amount of resources necessary to run &app;. NOTE: introduction might need more work. You can start &app; in the following ways: Applications menu Choose Office &app; Word Processor . Command line To start &app; from a command line, type the following command, then press Return: abiword When you open a document in the file manager and &app; is associated with that type of document, &app; will be started automatically. When you start &app;, the following window is displayed: *Screenshot here* *Explanation here* This documentation will only give instructions on how to access the functionality of &app; via the menu's. The icons on the toolbar are shortcuts to the most frequently used functionality which is also accessible from the menu's. To figure out what the function of each icon is, point to the icon. After a second it's function will appear. The basic installation of &app; includes support for the most frequently used document file formats. The plugins include support for more file formats. Format Extension Note &app; .abw This is the native file format of &app;, use this unless you have good reasons to use another file format. &app; Templates .awt This format is identical to normal Abiword documents, except for being marked as a template and using a different filename extension. Encoded Text .txt .text HTML/XHTML .html .htm .xhtml Microsoft Word .doc Plain Text .txt .text Rich Text Format .rtf GZipped &app; .zabw These are normal Abiword documents using compression. Compression can be useful for reducing the file size of large documents. Format Extension Note Applix Word .aw BZipped &app; .bzabw Similar to GZipped &app;, but uses bzip2 for greater compression. ClarisWorks/AppleWorks 5 .cwk Saving not supported, only opening. DocBook .dbk .xml Hancom Word .hwp Saving not supported, only opening. ISCII Text .isc .iscii KWord .kwd LaTeX .latex Microsoft Write .wri Saving not supported, only opening. MIF .mif Newsgroup Formatted Text .nws OpenDocument .odt OpenOffice.org Writer .sxw Outlook Express Email .eml Palm Document .pdb Portable Document Format .pdf In the &app; version for Unix and Linux, writing PDF files is already supported in the basic installation. Basic support for opening PDF files is available. T602 .602 .txt Saving not supported, only opening. StarWriter up to 5.x .sdw Saving not supported, only opening. WML .wml WordPerfect(tm) .wpd .wp Saving not supported, only opening. All versions are supported. XSL-FO .fo It is possible that data is lost if open or save documents in file formats other than the Abiword document file format. While the &app; developers do their best to prevent this from happening, you can only be completely certain that there will be no data loss if you use the &app; document file format. If you open &app; without opening an already existing document, a new blank document will automatically be created. To create a new document while you already have a document opened in &app;, choose FileNew . To open a document choose FileOpen... or click the Open button in the toolbar to display the Open File dialog. Select the file that you want to open, then click Open. If you open a document in the file manager and &app; is associated with that type of document, &app; will be started automatically. &app; records the paths and filenames of the five most recent files that you edited and displays the files as menu items on the File menu. You can also click on the arrow pointing downward near the Open icon on the toolbar to display the list of recent files. There are three options for saving a document: Save, Save As... and Save Copy... If you want to save a document for the first time, choose FileSave As... to display the Save File As dialog. Even if you choose another option to save the document from the File menu, you will always be given the Save File As dialog if you save the document for the first time. Give the document you want to save a name, and optionally specify where you want to save it and in which file format, then click OK. You can also use Save As... to save an existing document under a different name. FileSave is used to save the changes you made to an existing document. FileSave Copy... is used to save a copy of an existing document under the same name. If you choose to use Save Copy... , you will probably have to change the location where you want the file to be saved, because you can't save two documents with the same name in one directory. Templates are documents with missing information which are used to produce a finished document. Templates can be useful because they allow you to produce a finished document faster than if you were creating a new document from scratch. Templates already contain a modified layout and placeholder text, so you fill in your own text in the template and save it as a normal document. A few templates are already included in &app;, you can access them by choosing FileNew using Template... . You can create your own templates by creating a document and then saving it as an AbiWord Template. To make your own templates appear in the New using Template... dialog, you can place your templates in the templates directory. The location of this directory is %USERPROFILE%\AbiSuite\templates on Windows, /usr/share/AbiSuite-2.4/templates on Unix and Linux and /Users/*your_user_name*/Library/Application Support/AbiSuite/templates on Mac OS X. Choose FileProperties... to open the Document Properties dialog. Here you can enter various information about the document. The information you enter here can be used by the Edit Field... function. Choose FileRevert to revert the document to the last saved version. This will undo all the changes made to the document since it was saved for the last time. Choose EditUndo to undo changes made to a document step by step. Once you have used Undo, you can choose EditRedo to reverse the changes made by Undo. *Text has yet to come* *Text has yet to come* *Text has yet to come* To cut text from the document, select text in the document and choose Edit Cut. The text will then be memorized and removed from the document, and you can use EditPaste to place the text you just cut somewhere else in the document. The function EditCopy works the same as Cut, with the exception that it will not remove the selected text. You can also cut and copy text from other applications and then paste it in &app;, and the other way around. With EditPaste Unformatted the original layout (for example font type, size or color) the text had will be forgotten when you paste it in a document in &app;, and the layout for that document will be applied to the pasted text. To find text, choose the option EditFind... and enter a search term in the Find what field, then click Find . If &app; finds a match for the search term you entered, the view will be moved to the location of the text, and the text will be highlighted. EditReplace... works similar to Find..., but will also allow you to replace the text which is found, if a match was found for the search term you entered. In addition EditGo To... allows you to navigate to a specific line or page number. It can also navigate to bookmarks in the document if you have defined bookmarks with InsertBookmark... . If you need to insert special characters which are not located on your keyboard, you can choose EditSymbol... to find and insert them in the document. The Insert Symbol dialog will then appear. In the top left corner of the dialog you can select the font you will be using for the characters you insert. This is important because it is possible that certain fonts miss certain characters. In list on the left side of the dialog, titled Unicode Block, you can select groups of related characters. This makes it easier to search through the huge amount of special characters. On the right side of the dialog you will see a list with two tabs, Character Table and Character Details. With the Character Table tab you can see which characters you can insert. You can select a character by clicking them. You can insert them in the document by double clicking them. You can use the Character Details tab to see details of the character which you have currently selected. &app; can automatically check the spelling of the words in your document. If you type a word which is not found in the dictionary by &app;, a jagged red line will be shown under that word. You can then check the spelling with ToolsCheck Spelling... . A faster way to do this is to right click an underlined word. By default the spelling checker uses the English dictionary. If you are typing a document in a different language, you can have to change the language of the document by choosing ToolsSet Language... in order for the spelling checker to work correctly with the different language. This will open the Set Language... dialog. Double click on the language you wish to use in the document, and click Close . By default only an English dictionary for the spelling checker is delivered with &app;. If you want the spelling checker to work with other languages you might need to install dictionaries for the GNU Aspell spelling checker which are designed for those languages. NOTE: it's that way in my case, when I use Ubuntu installed with English as language, investigate this, and the bug with setting the language. Unfortunately the dictionaries used by &app; are not 100% complete. It might happen that the spelling checker claims a word to be misspelled even if you are sure that the word is spelled correctly. You can insert page numbers by choosing InsertPage Numbers... . This will open the Page Numbers... dialog. Here you can choose the alignment and position of the page numbers. If you are satisfied, click Insert to insert page numbers. Page numbers will be inserted on all pages of your document, and if you create new pages after inserting page numbers, page numbers will be inserted in those pages as well. NOTE: Explain how it can also be done through InsertFields , and how users can create exceptions for pages which they do not want to be numbered The ruler displays the physical dimensions of your document. The ruler can use several different units of measurement: inches, centimeters, points and pica's. To change the unit of measurement used by the ruler, choose EditPreferences... and change the unit of measurement with the Units drop down box. The ruler has more functions. With the ruler you can change the page margins and the indents of paragraphs. You can also set tab stops on the ruler to align text.

# Name 1 Left indent 2 First line indent 3 Right indent 4 Left margin 5 Right margin 6 Top margin 7 Bottom margin (not visible on screenshot) 8 Tab stop selector The margins of the page are indicated by grey areas on the left and right ends of the ruler. You can see two small squares near the top of the ruler, near the ends of the margins. To change the margins, drag the the squares to the left or right. You can change the indentation of paragraphs with the three triangles located on the horizontal ruler. The triangle near the top left on the ruler is used for setting the indentation of the first line of a paragraph only. The triangle near the bottom left on the ruler is used for setting the indentation of all the lines in the paragraph, except for the first line. The triangle near the bottom right on the ruler is used to set the indentation to the right side of the paragraph, for all lines of the paragraph. If you want to be able to define the page margins and the dimensions of your document more precisely, you can do so with Page Setup which is accessible through File Page Setup.... You can also change the indentation and tab stops for paragraphs by choosing FormatParagraph... . With tab stops you can change the alignment of text. There are five different types of tab stops, by default the left tab stop is visible in the tab stop selector. You can select different tab stops by clicking on the tab stop selector. Once you have selected the tab stop which you want to use, click on a place in the horizontal ruler to place the tab stop there. To move a tab stop which was already placed, click and drag it. To remove a tab stop, right click it. When you have placed a tab stop in the ruler, you can jump to that tab stop by pressing the Tab key on your keyboard. If you do not use the Tab key to jump to the tab stops and simply type paragraphs as you would normally, the tab stops will not work.

# Type Function 1 Left Aligns the left edge of the text to the right side of the tab stop. 2 Center Aligns the text to the center of the tab stop. 3 Right Aligns the right edge of the text to the left side of the tab stop. 4 Decimal Aligns the decimals of numbers to the center of the tab stop (only recognizes dots as decimals) 5 Bar Identical to the left tab stop, but also places a vertical line to the left side of the tab stop While the page margins apply to the whole document, you can define different settings for indentation and tab stops for every separate paragraph. NOTE: is the explanation for tab stops clear enough? NOTE: perhaps use sect3's here because this page might become a bit large, and so that we can give separate titles for the ruler, indents and tab stops. *Text has yet to come* Alongside &app;, a set of so-called "plugins" is provided. A plugin provides an extention to &app; to enhance it's functionality. Support for the OpenDocument file format is for example provided by a plugin. Another example is &app;'s grammar checking functionality, which is also provided by a plugin. None of the plugins are required to be installed on the system. This means that the availability of functionality that is provided by a plugin depends on the particular installation of &app; you are using. If you installed &app; yourself, then make sure you installed all the plugins you want to use. Otherwise please ask your system administrator to customize your &app; installation to your liking. Text has yet to come The AbiCommand plugin provides a powerful command line interface to &app; (the so-called AbiCommand Interface). This interface can be directly accessed from a terminal, but also for example from a web-application. It can be used to control various aspects of &app;, such as converting a file from one file format to another, or opening, editing and printing documents. To access the AbiCommand Interface, type the following command on the command line, then press Return: abiword --plugin AbiCommand The following commands are provided by the AbiCommand Interface: Command Arguments Description Foo Bar This command does something TODO: show a tiny popen() snippet here Text has yet to come Text has yet to come Text has yet to come Text has yet to come Text has yet to come Text has yet to come Text has yet to come Text has yet to come Text has yet to come The following keyboard shortcuts are used in Abiword. They are mostly identical to the keyboard shortcuts used in other word processors. Key Combination Function Ctrl + B Bold text Ctrl + I Italic text Ctrl + U Underlined text NOTE: is it even useful to mention keyboard shortcuts if the keyboard shortcuts are already visible menu's of Abiword itself?