I'm writing this from memory as the installation is on someone else's computer and she doesn't yet have Internet access. I installed Antix-16 Base for her and it has Abiword as its word processor (I don't know the version offhand; I could check this later).

When using Abiword it sometimes goes into RTL mode for no apparent reason. The text is English with no foreign characters, and RTL is not set in the preferences dialog. Once it is in this mode, the only cure seems to be to save and exit, then restart the program and reload the file. Very tiresome!

It happened twice, both times after cutting and pasting text. I couldn't find anything similar by googling.

Might be a hardware glitch on her keyboard Hazel.
Since you can't find it replicated online in your searches.
Maybe a can of air and blowing out crumbs will fix it?
Or another external keyboard to test?

Edit: I don't run base anymore. Just full iso installs.
So I have the libre-office application instead of abiword.

Also

Have you tried using

to find the config text files in /home/username and maybe rename one .backup or .old and open abiword and let it make a new config file for the renamed one.

Might need to log out or something like a reboot also before trying this out.

I haven't tried anything yet; I came home and went straight into Google. I don't actually think it's a configuration file problem; if it were, restarting the program wouldn't clear it. But I'll try that next time.

In retrospect, using the base spin was probably a mistake, but not easily correctable now. If she had an internet connection, I'd just download LO and switch to that. AntiX uses Debian Jessie repositories so in theory I could download LO core and LO writer onto a usb drive at home, take them over and dpkg them in. It would probably take quite a while to get all the dependencies added though. I'd rather get Abiword working properly.