Introduction to word processing with Abiword
Tutorial
Advanced Features

This section will eventually describe some of the more advanced features of Abiword. For the moment, this section contains only a terse description of a few of the extra features that appear to be planned for Abiword. Futher detail can be found in the Abiword help system.

Tutorial
Advanced Features
Scripts

At the time of writing, the Scripts feature of Abiword appears to be incomplete. However it seems to be based on the PERL programming language. A description of PERL is beyond the scope of this document. This section will be filled out in more detail as Abiword progresses.

Since the abiword documents are saved using an XML format, it should be fairly straightforward to use PERL to manipulate abiword documents, assuming you have a knowledge of PERL. For most users however this feature can be safely ignored.

Tutorial
Advanced Features
Plugins

Plugins allow you to add customised features to Abiword seperate from the main program. There are a number of plugins that can be downloaded from the Abiword web-site http://www.abisource.com/.

To install a plugin into Abiword:

    Download the plugin from the internet and store it in a directoryFor the purpose of this exercise we will assume that the plugin has been stored in your home directory of /home/guest.

    Click on the Tools menu and select the Plugins option.The Abiword Plugin Manager dialogue box will be displayed.

    Click on the Install new plugin button.The following dialogue box is displayed.

    Select the plugin that you want to install.

    Click the OK button.The plugin will be installed.