Self-publishing using OpenOffice.org 3 Writer (draft)
This is an early draft version of Self-publishing using OpenOffice.org 3 Writer, which is now available as a printed book and an eBook (PDF). The online version may eventually be updated if I ever have some spare time.
This book is for beginners to intermediate users of OpenOffice.org Writer. It concentrates on the needs of people writing a book-length document such as a novel or a collection of poetry or essays—including people who want to self-publish their book using one of the on-demand printing services like Lulu, Booksurge, or Lightning Source.
I plan to produce a variation on this book aimed at more technical or academic writers producing, for example, a thesis or a software user guide—documents that often require the use of more complex features.
What do you need to do before you use this book?
This book assumes that you have successfully installed OpenOffice.org 3 on your computer and can create, edit, save, and print files.
If you are still using OOo2.x, you will find that a few things are different between the two programs. I will try to mark major differences on these pages, but I may forget at times to do so. Do not be alarmed if you don’t find what I describe here.
Contents of draft book
- Introduction to Writer
- Setting up Writer
- Choosing options for all of OOo
- Choosing Load/save options
- Choosing options for Writer
- Choosing Language settings
- Preparing to check spelling
- Controlling automatic functions
- Writing and editing
- Working with text
- Finding and replacing text and formatting
- Spelling and thesaurus
- Autocorrection, word completion, and autotext
- Using language tools
- Footnotes and endnotes
- Including document information
- Reorganizing using the Navigator
- Designing your book
- Planning the book design
- Using styles
- Basic page layout using page styles
- Creating and modifying paragraph styles
- Formatting pages
- Formatting text
- Typography
- Hyphenating words
- Working with fonts
- Working with paragraphs
- Applying paragraph styles
- Applying character styles
- Inserting special characters
- Inserting dashes
- Defining your own tab stop and indents
- Working with lists
- Creating PDFs
- Adding images (pictures and graphics)
- Image creation and editing
- Preparing images for black-and-white printing
- Inserting an image from a file
- Inserting images from other sources
- Modifying an image
- Positioning images within the text
- Arranging images
- Anchoring images
- Aligning images
- Wrapping text around images
- Using Writer’s drawing tools
- Creating a table of contents
- Creating a table of contents quickly
- Maintaining a table of contents
- Defining a hierarchy of headings
- Choosing paragraph styles for outline levels
- Customizing a table of contents
- Index/Table page
- Entries page
- Styles page
- Background page
- Creating an index
- Adding index entries
- Creating an alphabetic index quickly
- Customizing index entries
- Example of using an index key
- Customizing an index: Index/Table page
- Customizing the appearance of an index
- Maintaining an index
- Viewing and editing existing index entries
- Creating special effects
- Drop caps
- Character spacing
- Rotating text
- Centering text on a page
- Paragraph borders and backgrounds
- Page borders and backgrounds
- Header/footer special effects
- Graphical text art using Fontwork
- Tracking changes
- Preparing a document for review
- Recording changes
- Merging and comparing modified documents
- Inserting, editing, and replying to notes
- Using templates
- Customizing Writer
Topics not covered in this book, but intended for a second book:
- Including tables of data
- Creating a table
- Formatting a table
- Formatting cells
- Inserting and formatting rows and columns
- Merging and splitting cells and tables
- Data entry in tables
- Deleting, copying, and moving a table
- Using cross-references
- Master documents
- Including spreadsheets
- Embedding or linking from Calc
- Using spreadsheet functions in a table
- Advanced page layout
Acknowledgments
Much of the material in this book is based on Getting Started with OpenOffice.org 3 and the OpenOffice.org 3 Writer Guide, produced by a team of volunteers known as OOoAuthors. Copies of these and other books by OOoAuthors are available in free PDF on the OpenOffice.org Documentation Project’s website, and in low-cost printed editions through Lulu.com.
This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, version 3.0.
