Special characters.

You can insert foreign and other special characters in your file by selecting the Special character command from the Insert menu.

You can also insert non-printing characters which control word wrapping on the screen and in the printed document:

• For a non-breaking space, press Shift and the Spacebar. This will prevent a line breaking at the space.
• For a non-breaking hyphen or ``hard hyphen'', press Ctrl with the - key. This will prevent a line breaking at the hyphen.

You can use the Show Formatting Marks command (tap on the View menu followed by More) to select which non-printing characters are displayed on screen.

Bullets & symbols.

To emphasise paragraphs that are items on a list you can precede each paragraph with a bullet.

• To add a bullet to a paragraph, tap or select the bulletted list button from the Formatting Menu or select Bullets and Numbering from the Format Menu. Use the pull down menus to change the bullet format, i.e. the size or colour of the bullet character.

Line spacing.

When you select a particular font size, AbiWord automatically uses an appropriate line spacing to make sure that there will always be a gap between successive lines of text. You might sometimes wish to override these settings, e.g. in a paragraph with different sizes of text.

• To set line spacing: select Indents and Spacing from the Format menu and enter a point size and one option from the pull down menu e.g. double line spacing.
• To insert extra blank space between paragraphs: enter point sizes for the "Space Before" and "Space After".