Most word-processors are text editors with formatting capabilities, KWord offers more. It's based around the idea of frame based layout. Objects including text, charts and pictures are placed in frames which can be positioned anywhere on a page. This kind of layout capability is usually associated with a desktop publishing application.
Of course, if you want to produce a simple document you can select one of the text-orientated templates which contain a text frame filling the entire page; KWord then behaves just like a traditional word-processor.
Templates are also provided for a couple of sizes of envelope and mailing labels but the list is not extensive.
The default KWord interface is relatively uncluttered, with two toolbars providing basic operations at the top of the window, one down the side containing commands for inserting new frames and a document structure window showing the layout of the current document.
Rulers along the horizontal and vertical edges of the document window allow tabs and margins to be set. The status bar at the bottom of the screen provides only the current page and the number of pages, other word-processors provide much more detailed information such as the document language.
There are three view modes: page layout, text and preview mode. The default view, page layout, shows an accurate representation of how the document will look on page complete with margins and graphics. Text shows continuous text without the page margins and preview mode allows you to view multiple pages at once to get an overview of the entire document.
Zooming is supported so you are not restricted to viewing a document at output size. Unfortunately KWord forgets the zoomlevel when you switch between views and reverts to 100%.
Basic word-processing functionality offered includes standard text formatting such as bold, italic, strikeout and underline styles. These are well implemented with lots of control available. Find and replace supports searching for specific text formatting and even regular expressions!
Paragraph formatting allows you to specify the amount of space above and below a paragraph, the line spacing, indentation, justification, borders and tabulation. One limitation is that measurements can only be entered in the units chosen as a global setting so you have to make a choice between centimetres, inches, picas and stick with it throughout but it can be changed at any time.
Creating lists and indenting paragraphs is very quick thanks to toolbar commands.
The Style Manager allows all text formatting to be managed by applying named styles to chunks of text, this allows consistent formatting to be maintained. Styles are stored with documents. To share styles between documents you can import styles from another document or create a template from a document. However, this is a once only process. Templates define the initial settings for a document; once you have created a document based on a template changing the template does not update the document.
Some editing conveniences, otherwise known as AutoCorrect functionality, are provided with the option to automatically capitalise the names of days, format URLs and remove two consecutive spaces. Lists of common mis-spellings can be defined and are provided for some languages. Of the ones I looked at American English, French and German had reasonable lists, the lists for British English and Italian contained only a few words. By default all of the auto-correction options are turned off. For some reason the AutoCorrect configuration dialog is separate from the other KWord configuration options.
Spell-checking "as you type" is available with the ubiquitous wavy red line appearing below misspelt words. Right clicking on a word provides a list of corrections. There is a choice of spelling checking interfaces and dictionaries. The feature works but you have to change the language manually as KWord has no concept of multi-lingual documents.
A thesaurus is also provided, at least for the English language.
Headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes, page breaks and special characters, such as accented letters and symbols, are all supported and configurable. You can insert variables such as the number of pages in the document or the current time.
Frequently used personal expressions such as "Yours sincerely," can be defined but they only way of inserting them is via a menu so there usefulness is limited. You can also insert comments but I was unable to work out how to view them.
The real power of KWord is in its frame capabilities. For example, when you insert a picture into a document it becomes a frame and you can drag it around the page, resize it and define how the text wraps around it. Place frames on top of each other and adjust the order in which they overlap.
One limitation is that text can only wrap around one side of a frame. This makes it impossible to put an image in the centre of a page with text on both sides of it.
Frames can also be placed inline with text; this is very useful for tables and formulas as the frame is moved with the surrounding text. When you insert a formula a new toolbar appears with a huge range of mathematical symbols.
The same KParts technology lets other KOffice applications embed objects into KWord and provide their own editing tools within KWord. This is common to most KOffice components, you can put a KSpread spreadsheet into KWord or a KWord document into KPresenter with ease.
Inserting a table is fairly straightforward, the Insert Table dialog prompts for the number of rows and columns and optionally you can select from a number of predefined formatting styles. Then you click where you want the table to appear. Columns can be resized by clicking and dragging or by exactly specifying a size. There is no autosize option. Row resizing seems broken with the row returning to its original size and the rows beneath being obscured. Inserting or deleting rows is easily carried out via menu options.
It is not possible to select entire rows or columns but you can select multiple cells by holding down control and clicking in them and then apply formatting.
As far I could ascertain, it is not possible to select an entire table; very handy if you want to move it somewhere else by cutting and pasting.
Basic mail merge functionality is provided although on my installation the only option was to edit mail merge data within KWord itself using a rather simplistic editor. No option to import or export the data from a file was provided.
Page layout is restricted to changing the size, orientation and page margins. It is not possible to define a document with multiple sections, for example one portion in landscape and the other portrait although you can adjust the margins on a per page basis.
Creating columular layouts has to be done manually using text frames, although there is a template provided for a simple two column layout.
The usual statistics can be displayed on the number of words, sentences and lines in your document. For a short document this took several seconds to appear and isn't remembered.
In use KWord feels extremely fast and responsive. I can't really over exagerate this. Screen redrawing is virtually instantaneous and reflowing the document when you copy and paste large chucks of text is practically instant. Editing works as you would expect with familiar keyboard shortcuts. One tip for users of other word-processors, enable the "Move caret with page up/down option" in the KWord settings to make editing more comfortable.
KWord is let down by its user interface which hides some of the functionality too well. For example there is no goto page dialog which is a serious drawback if you're trying to edit long documents. However, you can quickly see a list of pages in the document structure panel and double clicking on a page name will jump to that part of the document. Likewise bookmarks can be defined by selecting Insert, Bookmark which is logical enough but to use them you select "Select Bookmark..." which is hidden on the Tools menu.
Keyboard shortcuts are present and fully configurable but are only shown for menu options, not on the tooltips associated with toolbar commands.
Simple operations such as inserting page numbers have to be performed manually by setting up a header, then inserting the appropriate fields.
Table support is fairly complete but operations such as selecting rows or columns are not immediately obvious. However, the most features are there and do work. All the features I tested, with the exception of type anywhere cursor, worked. KWord did crash on my once but redeemed itself by restoring my work from an automatically generated recovery file.
There are some kerning problems, occasionally it can be difficult to see whether there is a space between two words. A couple of screen redrawing problems were also noticeable but these were limited to the odd stray pixel. Some areas of the user interface are quite polished. For example, The fonts list shows renderings of each font. Other areas could do with more work.
I was disappointed to find that copying a collection of cells from KSpread inserted them as text rather than a table.
I've heard things about the quality of the printed output do to the kerning issues, unfortunately I haven't been able to get a printer working with Unix to test this.
Filters
Of critical importance is the ability to exchange documents with other users. KWord comes with filters for OpenOffice, Microsoft Word and Wordperfect. A complete list can be found on the KOffice website.
I've yet to hear anyone raving about document interoperability, although I believe LaTeX users don't have problems. Microsoft Word has become the de-facto standard for exchanging text documents in editable format. Nothing apart from Word will reliably read that format as the technical details have not been made publicly available. KWord makes a best effort. Other details such as a different collection of standard fonts on Windows and Unix systems mean that any Word document you import is unlikely to look as the author intended.
You can reasonably expect a document consisting only of text to reliably load into KWord, anything else is a bonus. Work continues on supporting more complex features, this was a problem in older versions of KWord as the program itself didn't support all the features contained in Word, now there is more parity between the two applications.