I noticed when trying to access help while in AbiWord that it would either try to get the help document from the Internet when accessing Help from the menu bar or search for a non-existing file when clicking the help button in a dialog window.

This seemed odd considering Synpatic showed abiword-help package to be installed. Upon further inspection of the properties for the abiword-help package, looking at the Installed Files tab in Synaptic, I could see many of the files listed did not exist on the hard drive.

To fix that, I did a reinstall of the abiword-help package which did put the files on the hard drive as listed in the Installed Files tab.

Yet that did not solve the problem of being able to access the local help files for Abiword. The problem was Abiword was looking for the help files in non-existent location. It was looking for the path of:

/usr/share/abiword-2.6/AbiWord/help/en-US/

To fix this as root:

Created the directory"AbiWord" under /usr/share/abiword-2.6

Created the following symbolic link while in /usr/share/abiword-2.6/AbiWord

ln -s /usr/share/abiword-2.6/help help

The help facility in AbiWord now works for me.