The AbiWord workspace

It is very similar to other word processors on the market. Here is the screen that appears when you start the program:

This window is composed of several bars of which it is important to know the names:

The titlebar

It contains the path and filename of the current document (by default Untitled), the name of the program, and the Minimize, Maximize/Restore, and Close buttons common to all windows.
When the current document has been modified but not saved, the filename in the titlebar is followed with a star.

The menubar

This bar contains all the pull-down menus; these menus contain all the commands available in AbiWord in a hierarchical menu. You can open a menu by clicking on its title.

The Standard toolbar

This toolbar contains the icons of the most used commands in AbiWord so that you don't have to use the menus for them.

The Format toolbar

This toolbar contains the most commonly used formatting commands so that you can format text without having to use the menus.

The ruler

The ruler lets you easily format paragraphs by setting indents, alignments, and margins. It can be graduated in inches or centimeters by selecting Options from the Tools menu.

The scrollbars

When there is not enough room in the AbiWord window to show the whole document, the scrollbars let you move through it. There can be scrollbars below or to the right of the page in the workspace. To scroll the document, click on the arrows at the end of the scrollbar or click on the gray bar and slide it.

The status bar

This has several pieces of information, notably the current page number and the total number of pages in the document. It also describes the command the mouse is on when you pull a menu down from the menubar.