What is Writer?

What Is Writer?

Writer is the word processor component of Apache OpenOffice. In addition to the usual features of a word processor (spelling check, thesaurus, hyphenation, autocorrect, find and replace, automatic generation of tables of contents and indexes, mail merge and others), Writer provides these important features:

• Templates and styles (see Chapter 2)
• Page layout methods, including frames, columns, and tables
• Embedding or linking of graphics, spreadsheets, and other objects
• Built-in drawing tools
• Master documents to group a collection of documents into a single document
• Change tracking during revisions
• Database integration, including a bibliography database
• Export to PDF, including bookmarks (see Chapter 9)
• And many more

These features are covered in detail in the Writer Guide.

Linking to Another Part of a Document

If you type in cross-references to other parts of a document, those references can easily get out of date if you reorganize the order of topics, add or remove material, or reword a heading. Writer provides two ways to ensure that your references are up-to-date, by inserting links to other parts of the same document or to a different document:

• Hyperlinks
• Cross-references

The two methods have the same result if you  Ctrl  +  click  the link when the document is open in Writer: you are taken directly to the cross-referenced item. However, they also have major differences:

• The text in a hyperlink does not automatically update if you change the text of the linked item (although you can change it manually), but changed text does automatically update in a cross-reference.

• When using a hyperlink, you do not have a choice of the content of the link (for example text or page number), but when using a cross-reference, you have several choices, including bookmarks.
• To hyperlink to an object such as a graphic, and have the hyperlink show useful text such as Figure 6, you need to either give such an object a useful name instead of leaving it as the default name (Graphics6), or you need to use the Hyperlink dialog to modify the visible text. In contrast, cross-references to figures with captions automatically show useful text, and you have a choice of several variations of the name.
• If you save a Writer document to HTML, hyperlinks remain active, but cross-references do not. (Both remain active when the document is exported to PDF.)