Please log in, fix my errors and add your own wisdom!

Abiword defaults to using Times New Roman as it's default font. This can be annoying if you don't like Times New Roman, particularly if you make a table and have to reset the font in every cell. The solution is to open ~/.AbiSuite/templates/normal.awt with a text editor like Vim or Gedit and replace Times New Roman with the font you like. Or you could do it with a sed. For example, if you like Bitstream Vera Sans and want to use the default (American) template

mkdir -p ~/.AbiSuite/templates &&
sed 's,Times New Roman,Bitstream Vera Sans,' /usr/share/AbiSuite-2.4/templates/normal.awt > ~/.AbiSuite/templates/normal.awt

Bitstream Vera Sans is a nice font but sadly AbiWord-2.4 has an annoying bug. It won't print some fonts in italic and Bitstream Vera Sans is one of the fonts affected. The solution is to use a different (inferior) font. You'll just have to try the fonts you have available and see which ones work.