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.

Inserting Special Characters

A special character is one not found on a standard English keyboard. For example, © ¾ æ ç ñ ö ø ¢ are all special characters. To insert a special character:

1. Place the cursor where you want the character to appear.
2. Choose Insert → Special Character to open the Special Characters dialog.
3. Select the characters (from any font or mixture of fonts) you wish to insert, in order, then click  OK . The selected characters are shown in the lower left of the dialog. As you select a character, it is shown on the lower right, along with its numerical code.

Different fonts include different special characters. If you do not find a particular special character, try changing the Font selection.

Figure 47: The Special Characters dialog, where you can insert special characters