Zeta
comes with both Gobe Productive (a complete office solution) and
Abi Word (an advanced word processor).
Abi Word is a cross platform project.
It is open source, and versions excists for Windows, Linux, QNX,
MacOS X and for Zeta (BeOS).
The word processor is intuitive to use and has the same basic features
as Microsoft Office. If you have been working on Microsoft Office,
Corel Word Perfect, or any other word processor with a graphical
user interface. If you are used to keyboard oriented word processing
systems, Abi Word can, as with most of the applications in Zeta,
be controlled with several shortcut/commands.
Accessing Abi Word's features can be done in three ways, from the
toolbar by clicking the various icons, from the menu bar above the
toolbars and from context menus. For example, you can save your
work by clicking File in the top menu bar and see a menu
with Save and Save As options along with New,
Open and Print. But you could also save the latest
changes in your document by moving the mouse to the diskette icon
(which means Save) or to the diskette with a pencil icon
(which means Save As).
To concentrate on writing, you can easily remove most of the menus
in Abi Word by choosing View and then Full screen;
only the menu bar on top of the screen will then remain.
You can change the tabs and margins from the menus or, even better,
direct by adjusting their bars and pointers along the edges of the
document.
If you are to write a newsletter for an organization or for your
job, or publish a flyer, you can easily choose between one, two
or three columns in the document.
Adding pictures to the documents is easy, simply click on the landscape
icon in the toolbar and navigate to the folder containing the picture,
choose it and add it. A tip is to add the pictures at an early stage
of writing the document, and then write arround the images.
One of the best things with Abi Word is saved for last: Abi Word
supports a range of file formats. It has it's own, but can also
read and write Rich Text Format, Word documents and OpenOffice document,
making it easy to share your thoughts and writings. And in Zeta
you can also print it to a PDF file.
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