Sams Teach Yourself StarOffice® 5 for Linux in 24 Hours

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Hour 7: Creating a New StarWriter Document

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Setting Options for All Text Documents


In Hour 4, you learned how to set General Options that apply to all the files that you create in StarOffice. In addition to these options, you can set options specific to all text documents. To see the Text Document Options dialog box, select Options from the Tools menu, and then choose Text Document. The dialog box opens with the first tab (Contents) selected, as in Figure 7.12.

The Text Document Options dialog box includes eight tabs that you can select to set different options. The sections that follow highlight the options that will be the most useful to you.

Note - The name Text Document refers to several types of documents that you can create in StarOffice, such as email messages, faxes from templates, and so forth. All these documents use the options that you set in the Text Document Options dialog box.

Choosing Which Parts of a Document Are Displayed

The Contents tab determines which types of information are displayed in the document window, and how they are displayed. In the Contents tab you can set the following options:

Figure 7.12
In the Text Document Options dialog box, you can set options for display, fonts, tables, and so forth for all text documents.

Choosing How the Document Layout Is Displayed

The Layout tab defines options for measurements and other features that determine how formatting options are applied or viewed. In the Layout tab you can set the following options:

In the Grid tab you can turn on a visible grid, or just "snap to" an invisible grid and set the resolution of the points on that grid.

Changing the Default Fonts for Text Documents

When you create a new StarOffice document and start entering text, StarOffice uses a certain font or typeface for your document.

In the Standard Fonts tab, shown in Figure 7.13, you can set the default fonts that are used for documents. Different fonts can be specified for different paragraph styles, including setting fonts for headings, indexes, and captions, in addition to the standard font for body text.

Figure 7.13
Default fonts for the main styles in a text document are set in the Standard Fonts tab of the Text Document Options dialog box.

If you prefer, you can check a box to set these fonts just for the current document, rather than for all text documents.

When you want to change the default font for one of the paragraph types, use the drop-down list to select from the installed StarOffice fonts.

Setting Text Document Printing Options

In the Print tab, shown in Figure 7.14, you can select which parts of a text document are printed. For example, you can turn on printing of special fields, tables, and so forth, or you can select to print only left or right pages.

As another example, suppose you're working on a document that contains many graphics. You can choose to print the document without printing any of the graphics or drawings while you're revising the early drafts of the document; or, you might choose to print the document without any of the notes that you've added.

Figure 7.14
Printing for a text document can be configured in the Print tab of the Text Document Options dialog box.

Tip - The Options button in the Print dialog box (opened from the File menu) enables you to go directly to the Text Document Options Print tab.

Setting Table Options

The final tab that is described for setting Text Document Options applies to Tables. In the Table tab you can set how the table size is affected by your editing.

Specifically, you can set the default width and height for columns and rows when you insert a new table, as well as whether changes to a cell's contents affect the entire table size or just the adjacent parts of the table.

The Text Document Options dialog box includes a few additional options that you can see in the figures or experiment with as you work, but the options that you're most likely to use as you create documents have been covered here.

Sams Teach Yourself StarOffice® 5 for Linux in 24 Hours

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Hour 7: Creating a New StarWriter Document

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