Abiword allows you to change the way paragraphs are handled.

If you look at the formatting toolbar, you will note that it displays formatting information about the text where the cursor is.

By default, it will be set to Times New Roman, 12, and the word Normal will be displayed next to the left of the font selector field.

However there are a number of other built in paragraph types (other than Normal) which can be useful when putting together a document.

If you click on the button to the right of the Paragraph type field, a list will be displayed of various paragraph formats as shown below.

These provide predefined formatting for the paragraphs for your document. For example, if you want to produce a bulleted list, rather than manually creating the bullet symbols, you can simply choose the Bullet List format.

Another particularly useful paragraph format are the numbered list formats. These keep track of the numbers when you have a numbered list. This avoids the problem of having to manually update all of the numbers if you add items to a list.

To start a new list, all that is required is to click on the button and choose Numbered List. The numbering will subsequently start from 1. and continue until there is a paragraph

There are a number of other formats as well, including bulleted lists, numbered lists. tick lists and so on. To select a paragraph format, click on the down arrow next to the format list and choose the format that you desire.