AhkWord 55

Superseded by AhkWord 56.

AhkWord is a word processor for Windows that AutoHotkey scripts can drive while you type. This is a work in progress.

Download and run

Nothing to install. Choose one of the two downloads below:

• AhkWord-55.zip (17 MB): everything AhkWord needs except .NET. If your computer hasn't got the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime, AhkWord offers on its first start to download it from Microsoft for itself only (about 70 MB, checked against Microsoft's checksums, into AhkWord's own folder: nothing is installed in Windows, and no administrator is needed), or to open Microsoft's page to install it for all of Windows.
• AhkWord-55-complete.zip (89 MB): the same with .NET 10 inside, for a computer that may not have it or isn't online. It asks nothing.

Then:

1. Unzip it anywhere you can write to: your Documents, a USB stick (not Program Files).
2. Double-click AhkWord.exe. Windows may say Windows protected your PC the first time, because AhkWord isn't signed: click More info, then Run anyway.

Just trying it out? Put an empty file named portable beside AhkWord.exe first. Everything AhkWord keeps (settings, recent files, templates, recovery copies) then stays in its own folder, and deleting the folder leaves no trace. Without it, settings are kept for your Windows user, shared by every copy of AhkWord.

AhkWord.exe is AutoHotkey v2.0.30, unchanged, under AhkWord's name, so you don't need AutoHotkey installed; it is under the GNU GPL v2, and its license and a link to its source come in the zip. The other parts' licenses are in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md and licenses.

The documentation is at https://burque505.github.io/AhkWord/, and what is done and what comes next is in the roadmap.

New since AhkWord 54 (iteration 55)

• Snippets (Insert > Snippets): type an abbreviation such as ;sig in a document, then Space or Enter (or have it fire at once), and it becomes its text, formatted, with its fields asked for. They are AutoHotkey hotstrings that work in AhkWord's own window only. Make a snippet by typing or pasting its text in its own dialog, with bold, italic, underline and fonts, or from the text selected in the document. Export as Script turns them into plain-text hotstrings for any other program. A snippet goes in where you type it, without starting a new line after it.
• Headers and footers as Word has them (Layout > Header & Footer):
  • several lines in a part: press Enter. A blank line at the end leaves space below a header.
  • a font, size, bold, italic and underline for the whole header or footer, and for selected words of their own, such as a firm's name in bold above its address.
  • a line below the header or above the footer.
  • Header from top and Footer from bottom: their distance from the page's edge. A header or footer taller than its margin pushes the text in, as in Word.
  • a first page of its own in every way: whether it has a header or footer at all, its text, font and line. The other pages' settings leave it alone, so a letterhead on page 1 only, or no page number on page 1, is easy. Page 1's text starts below its own header.
  • all of this is printed, shown on Show Pages' sheets, and kept in RTF, Word and OpenDocument files, both ways.
• Insert > Horizontal Line: a line across the text, in a paragraph of its own. It prints and is kept in every format; Markdown gets --- and HTML <hr>.
• Show Pages: the text moves below a taller header at once, not after the next edit; and the flicker and jump every minute or so while there were unsaved changes (the recovery copy) are gone.
• A new document starts in the Normal style's font.

Thanks to TheArkive's M-ArkDown, whose Markdown extensions AhkWord follows for list styles and picture sizes.