Introduction

The KWord Users Manual
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# Chapter 2. Introduction

# 2.1. Introduction

KWord, is a full featured WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Wordprocessor/Desktop Publishing Program.

KWord is part of the KOffice productivity suite for the K Dekstop Environment. Other applications in KOffice include

KOShell (toolbar/program starter)
KSpread (spreadsheet)
KPresenter (presentation creator)
KIllustrator (a vector drawing program)
KImageShop (a bitmap image editor)
KChart (for charts/graphs)
and KImage (an image viewer).

All KOffice applications were designed from the beginning to take advantage KDE 2.0. Because of this, KWord (like all of KOffice), supports drag and drop, themes, and many other advanced features you expect from todays desktop environment.

KWord is a wordprocessor which can work either as a traditional word processor, or as a simple but powerful desktop publishing application. This is possible because KWord is a frame oriented word processor, not a page oriented word processor (Microsoft Word, Word Perfect and Applixware are all page oriented word processors).

Frame oriented word processors work by creating one or more "frames" per page. Each frame acts as a boundry (like a frame which surrounds a photograph), which limits the text to the boundries of the frame. You can move and reshape these boundries, to define exactly where on the page the text will be placed. As you resize frames, the text layout is reworked to fit within these frames. You can easily "connect" one frame to the next. When you connect two frames, any text which does not fit within the first frame, flows easily and automatically into the next. In addition to text, you can include virtually anything inside a frame. A frame can contain a spreadsheet, clipart, pictures, a database form, or nearly any piece of data. Since each page can have any number of frames, documents can appear quite sophisticated while still remaining easy to edit.

Kword users also benefit from the auto wrap featurs in KWord. When you place one frame on top of part of another frame, the text from the "lowest" frame can be automatically wrapped around the newly created frame. This reformating all occurs in a WYSIWYG Graphical User Interface, and occurs as you edit.

KWord simplifies the creation of new pages (at the users option), by automatically creating frames for the next page, using the current page as a blueprint. This eliminates the need for the user to re-define the frame boundries for each page.

As a wordprocessor, KWord includes the most used options of many other word processors, while maintaing a simple interface. In addition to the features you expect from a modern wordprocessing package (text entry, bold face, italics, text alignment, text printing, etc), KWord can:

- Use predefined templates, to generate complex document layout with one click of the mouse. As a user, you can build your own templates, download templates from the web, or use the current document to create a new template.

- KWord allows very complicated numbering of lists. You are not limited to numbers or letters, you can define your own series for your special lists.

- Define paragraph layout styles, to shorten the editing time of your document, and ensure consistancy throughout a long document.

- Edit headers and footers for your documents. You can have different headers for even and odd pages, or the same headers throughout.

- Search through you document for text. You can further refine your search by specifying font, format, font size and many other features of the text. By adding wildcards to your search, the search and replace functions can become very powerful.

- Complete footnote and endnote support.

- Tables. You can either use the table formatting capabilities of KWord, or you can import any spreadsheet from KSpread.

- KWord has built in support for KParts. KParts allows you to insert any spreadsheet, picture, chart, graph, document, or any other data type from any KOffice application. You are free to edit that KPart using the tools designed for that task, without needing to start the application at all.

- KWord can zoom in or out to make the editing of your documents easier on any computer, and with any font size.

- KWord supports customizable toolbars and menus.

- KWord has extensive multilanguage support.

- You can embed formulas directly into KWord using the integrated formula editor.

The best part about KWord, is the effort that has been placed to make KWord a productive tool for all your needs from the simplest letter, to the most complex document you might need to work on.

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