KWord Features

Next to the extensive documentation KWord is shipped with this page provides a short overview of the most important features included in KWord.

KWord is a wordprocessor, and this means that all the things you would a wordprocessor to do are included. Features like writing text, deleting text, cut'n'copy'n'paste, assigning document formats and attributes to text, setting text alignment, and naturally you can print documents on any printer, Postscript printer or to PDF and fax.

Frame Orientation:
KWord is not page oriented like most wordprocessors are - KWord uses frames instead. This means that any story is displayed in a set of frames where the normal pages based setup is emulated by showing one frame per page. The user can create various stories and use the frames to position and flow the text accross columns and pages.
This system is easy, yet powerfull enough to range from simple letters to layouts like you see in a newspaper.

For displaying your text you can either choose to create all frames manually or set a default (comparable to a master page) in which your text will flow through the pages. You can for example tell KWord to create a new page with the same frames as the last page if the text does not fit. Or perhaps you like the auto-resize option, which scales a frame to fit exactly around text. You, the author, will have complete control of every position of any frame for your whole document, and also the positioning of your text on new pages, so your document creates itself as more text is entered.

The full control of positioning and sizing of text frames extends to graphics-frames and any other frame, allowing basic DTP in KWord. KWord allows not just one frame set, which contains a text-document, but as many as you want, allowing you to create newspaper like layouts with ease. And as the frame sets are named, you can keep an overview of your work by looking at the document-structure browser of your KWord document.

But you cannot only insert text frames. You can also insert pictures, embedded objects (formulas, diagrams, KSpread tables, etc.) as frames.

Because it often happens that frames are overlapping, KWord offers some options here too. You can specify for each text frame if the text should run around overlapping frames. So you can easily let the text run around pictures.

Templates:
When you start KWord and you want to create a new document you have to choose a template. Here are two groups of templates: Page layout and Text oriented. If you choose a Page layout template all frames are free placeable and are not positioned by looking at the page size. The Text oriented templates always contain a frame set which is fixed to the size of the page. This means frames of this frameset are positioned automatically from values like border sizes and the size of a header etc. Telling KWord to use 2 (or more) columns for a document simply means creating another frame per page in this basic frame set. In Text oriented documents all other frames of other frame sets are still freely placeable. So only the first frameset of text oriented documents acts like the pages in common wordprocessors.

Numbering:
In KWord you can do all crazy types of numberings. This means you can do chapter numbering (with multiple depths) and lists. You can use lower roman numbers, upper roman numbers, arabic numbers, lower alphabetical letters, upper alphabetical letters and different bullets for the numbering. Also you can specify the start offset.

Paragraph Settings, Indents and Tabulators:
For paragraphs you can set line spacing, spacing before and after the paragraph, configurable borders and tabulators. The tabulators are not full working yet, but left aligned, centered and right aligned tabs are already useable. Also you can set indents for the first line and the other lines of the paragraph.

Paragraph Layouts (Styles):
Each paragraph has a paragraph layout (style) which contains all settings about numbering, line spacing, paragraph spacing, tabulators, borders, indents, default font and alignment. You can create styles in the KWord stylist. Then you can apply such styles to paragraphs and specify quite exactly which settings should be updated/applied and which should be ignored. There are also defined some default styles for lists, headers and so on and you can of course add new ones. Using these styles you can e.g. easily make headers of different depths.

Headers and Footers:
You can switch on/off headers and footers in documents. You can define for headers and footers if they should be the same for the whole document, if they should be different for the first page or if they should be different for even and odd pages. To edit a header or footer you don't need to switch to another mode (like in most wordprocessors) - you only need to click into the frame of the header/footer and all pages are automatically updated. Another advantage of the frame orientation :-) Headers and footers resize themselves if you add or remove text.

Ruler:
As you can see in the screenshots KWord has rulers. But they are also quite interactive. So you can change the page borders, indents and tabulators with some clicks and mouse movements in the rulers very fast. A double click on a ruler opens the page format dialogbox, btw.

Find and Replace:
Finding text and replacing it is also quite powerful in KWord. As search entry you can not only specify the text which should be searched. You can also say which format (font, size, color, etc.) the text should have. This means you can say which format types should be ignored which are required. E.g. you can look for the text "Something" in Times, Bold and everything else (size, color, etc.) doesn't matter.

Search entries can be regular expressions and can have wildcards. Also it can be specified if KWord should search case sensitive or not and if only whole words should be looked up or not.

For the replace entry you can also specify formats and which formats should be ignored (default should be used there).

Tables:
Totally configurable tables are realized in KWord using frames. This means every table cell is a frameset. Rows and columns can of course be resized and tables can be moved. Also text can flow around tables, because tables are just frames too. Cell get autoresized if the text of a cell doesn't fit into the cell anymore. Tables can of course flow over multiple pages.

Footnotes:
KWord allows to insert footnotes into the text. The footnote text appears in a frame at the bottom of the page, and the footnote number can be either automatically incremented or set manually. Of course KWord can handle endnotes too.

Autocorrection:
With KWord's autocorrection you can tell KWord that the first letter of the first word of a sentence should always be written in uppercase, when entering two uppercase letters to convert the second to a lower case, to replace normal quotes by (configurable) typographical ones and so on. Also there is the possibility to define more flexible rules, like a (c) should be replaced by a © or -> should be replaced by an arrow in font symbol and so on.

Undo KWord has multi-level undo, also known as unlimited undo levels. And just about every action can be reverted with undo.

Copy paste You can copy and paste about every object there is in KWord, including whole frames with their text

Inline objects Every frame can also be anchored to the text, so when you enter more text the inline move down with the text, allowing you to simply place a formula or a spreadsheet right into your text.
These objects are frames, but behave as any other text when they are inline, so things like alignment is done just like any other text.
What about inlining one page, or one paragraph of another KWord document, for example an older document which you are referring to, a simple action in KWord!

Spell checking You can spell check one word by right-clicking on that word, basic spell checking is naturally available in all languages (supported by ispell/aspell).