OpenOffice.org BASIC Guide - OpenOffice.org wiki

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C H A P T E R 6
6 Text Documents
In addition to pure strings, text documents also contain formatting information. These may appear at any point in
the text. The structure is further complicated by tables. These include not only single-dimensional strings, but also
two-dimensional fields. Most word processing programs now finally provide the option of placing drawing
objects, text frames and other objects within a text. These may be outside the flow of text and can be positioned
anywhere on the page.
This chapter presents the central interfaces and services of text documents.
The Structure of Text Documents
Editing Text Documents
More than Just Text
The first section deals with the anatomy of text documents and concentrates on how a OpenOffice.org Basic
program can be used to take iterative steps through a OpenOffice.org document. It focuses on paragraphs,
paragraph portions and their formatting.
The second section focuses on efficiently working with text documents. For this purpose, OpenOffice.org
provides several help objects, such as the TextCursor object, which extend beyond those specified in the first
section.
The third section moves beyond work with texts. It concentrates on tables, text frames, text fields, bookmarks,
content directories and more.
Information about how to create, open, save and print documents is described in Working with Documents,
because it can be used not only for text documents, but also for other types of documents.
The Structure of Text Documents
A text document can essentially contain four types of information:
The actual text
Templates for formatting characters, paragraphs, and pages
Non-text elements such as tables, graphics and drawing objects
Global settings for the text document
This section concentrates on the text and associated formatting options.
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