The Writer interface
- The Writer interface
- Working with documents
- Working with text
- Formatting text
- Formatting pages
- Adding comments and graphics to a document
- Creating a table of contents, index, or bibliography
- Printing from Writer
- Sending a fax
- Tracking changes to a document
- Fields, mail merge, master documents, forms
- Linking to another part of a document
The main Writer workspace is shown below. The menus and toolbars are described in Chapter 1 (Introducing OpenOffice.org).
Other features of the Writer interface are covered in this chapter.
Status bar
The Writer status bar provides information about the document and convenient ways to quickly change some document features. From left to right, the fields are as follows.
Page number
Shows the current page number, the sequence number of the current page (if different), and the total number of pages in the document. For example, if you restarted page numbering at 1 on the third page, its page number is 1 and its sequence number is 3.
To jump to the location of a bookmark, right-click on this field. A list of bookmarks pops up; click on the required one.
To jump to a specific page in the document, double-click in this field. The Navigator opens. Click in the Page Number field and type the required page number.
Page style
Shows the style of the current page. To change the page style, right-click on this field. A list of page styles pops up; choose a different style by clicking on it.
To edit the page style, double-click on this field.
Language
Shows the language for the selected text.
Click to open a menu where you can choose another language for the selected text or for the paragraph where the cursor is located. You can also choose None to exclude the text from spellchecking or choose More... to open the Character dialog.
Insert mode
Click to toggle between Insert and Overwrite modes when typing.
Selection mode
Click to toggle between STD (Standard), EXT (Extend), ADD (Add) and BLK (Block) selection. EXT is an alternative to Shift+click when selecting text. See Working with text for more information about ADD and BLK.
Digital signature
If the document has been digitally signed, an icon [[Image:]] shows in this part of the Status bar. You can double-click the icon to view the certificate.
Section or object information
When the cursor is on a section or object (such as a picture), information about that item appears in this field. For details, consult the Help or the Writer Guide.
View layout
Click the appropriate icon to change between single page, side-by-side, and book layout views. You can edit the document in any view.
Zoom
To change the view magnification, drag the Zoom slider or click on the + and – signs. Zoom interacts with the selected view layout to determine how many pages are visible in the document window.
Document views
Writer has several ways to view a document: Print Layout, Web Layout, and Full Screen. To access these and other choices, go to the View menu and click on the required view. (When in Full Screen view, press the Esc key to return to either Print or Web Layout view.)
When in Web Layout, you can use the Zoom slider on the Status bar, as described above. In Print Layout, you can use both the Zoom slider and the View Layout icons on the Status bar.
You can also choose View > Zoom from the menu bar to display the Zoom & View Layout dialog, where you can set the same options as on the Status bar. In Web Layout view, most of the choices are not available.
Moving quickly through a document
In addition to the navigation features of the Status bar (described above), you can use the main Navigator window and the Navigation toolbar as described in Chapter 1 (Introducing Apache OpenOffice).
In Writer, you can also display the Navigation toolbar by clicking on the small Navigation icon near the lower right-hand corner of the window below the vertical scroll bar, as shown below.
The Navigation toolbar shows icons for all the object types shown in the Navigator, plus some extras (for example, the results of a Find command).
Click an icon to select that object type. Now all the Previous and Next icons (in the Navigator itself, in the Navigation Toolbar, and on the scroll bar) will jump to the next object of the selected type. This is particularly helpful for finding items like index entries, which can be difficult to see in the text. The names of the icons (shown in the tooltips) change to match the selected category; for example, Next Graphic, Next Bookmark, or Continue search forward.
For more uses of the Navigator in Writer, see the Writer Guide.
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