# Chapter 2. Introduction

# 2.1. Introduction

KWord, is a full featured WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Wordprocessor/Desktop Publishing Program.

KWord is part of the KOffice productivity suite for the K Dekstop Environment. Other applications in KOffice include

KSpread (spreadsheet)
KPresenter (presentation creator)
KIllustrator (a vector drawing program)
KImageShop (a bitmap image editor)
Katabase (database)
KFormula (formula editor)
KChart (for charts/graphs)
and KImage (an image viewer).

All KOffice applications were designed from the beginning to take advantage KDE 2.0. Because of this, KWord (like all of KOffice), supports drag and drop, themes, and many other advanced features.

KWord is a wordprocessor which can work either as a traditional word processor, or as a simple Desktop Publishing Application. This is possible because KWord is a frame oriented word processor, not a page oriented word processor (Microsoft Word, Word Perfect and Applixware are all page oriented word processors).

Frame oriented word processors work by creating one or more "frames" per page. Each frame acts as a boundry, which limits the text within the frame. You can move and reshape these boundries, to define where on the page the text will be placed. As you resize frames, the text layout is reworked to fit within these frames. You can easily "connect" one frame to the next. When you connect two frames, any text which does not fit within the first frame, flows easily and automatically into the next. In addition to text, you can include virtually anything inside a frame. A frame can contain a spreadsheet, clipart, pictures, a database form, or nearly any piece of data. Since each page can have any number of frames, documents can appear quite sophisticated while still remaining easy to edit. Kword users also benefit from the auto wrap featurs in KWord. When you place one frame on top of part of another frame, the text from the "lowest" frame can be automatically wrapped around the newly created frame. This reformating all occurs in a WYSIWYG Graphical User interface, and occurs as you edit.

KWord simplifies the creation of new pages (at the users option), by automatically creating frames for the next page, using the previous page as a blueprint. This eliminates the need for the user to re-define the frame boundries for each page.

As a wordprocessor, KWord includes the most used options of many other word processors, while maintaing a simple interface. In addition to the features you expect from a modern wordprocessing package (text entry, bold face, italics, text alignment, text printing, etc), KWord can:

- Templates. Using predefined templates, complex document layout becomes a one step process. As a user, you can build your own templates, or use the current document to create a new template.

- KWord allows very complicated numbering of lists. You are not limited to numbers or letters, you can define your own!

- paragraph layout styles

- Editing headers and footers to maintain a consistant look for your documents

- You can search through you document for text and limit your search to text with specific formatting. By adding wildcards, the search and replace functions can become very powerful

- Complete footnote and endnote support

- Tables

- Incorporation of Pictures, Tables and other components from KOffice

- STUFF....