Re: [libreoffice-users] after the fact page numbers

Hi Chris:

On 25/09/2023 20:02, Chris J. wrote:
> Hi.
>
>
> Whole book, each chapter is a file. No page numbers. My bad.
>
>
> Without going through each and every page, is there a way to propagate headers and footers on every 
> page with the requisite page numbers and whatever else throughout a chapter. I realize I will 
> likely need to do this one chapter at a time.
>
>
> I suspect this has something to do with a style sheet. I'm unclear how to propagate throughout the 
> document after the fact of the document's creation, i.e. I've already written the book.
>
>
> Also, If I manage this miracle. will the chapter numbers be properly re sequenced if I concatenate 
> all the chapters. That would really be nice. I'll be doing that manually in LO Writer using 
> cut-n-paste unless there's a better more automated way.

Styles are really the answer to well constructed documents and they do seem like an overly large 
burden when you first start looking at them. But there is some very good documentation on the Open 
Documents website: https://documentation.libreoffice.org/

I imagine all your separate documents have the same basic default page style. If you edit your page 
style in the first document and activate the footer and then insert the page number field into one 
of the footers, every page will then have a number.

If you then open your next chapter and select all the text (Ctrl-A) and then copy it (Ctrl-C), you 
can paste this text into the bottom of the last page of your first chapter and all the pages of the 
second chapter will then have numbers which carry on the sequence of the first chapter.

You will probably want each chapter to start on a right hand page and that may require inserting a 
blank page at the end of a preceding chapter.

When you come to formatting the entire book, you will probably come round to the idea that you need 
several page styles. These may be for a preface with page numbers in roman numerals; for the first 
page of a chapter where you may not want a header and the chapter title may need to be part way 
down the page. Then any blank left hand page would be another style (possibly without header or 
footer - depending on your style preferences). And finally another style for any back-matter.

Each new page style is easily developed from the default page style. The difficulty comes in changing the 
style of a page. The traditional double-click used to change a paragraph style doesn't work, in my 
experience, for page styles. What you do is go to the bottom of the preceding page, click Insert > More 
breaks > manual break > select page break and in the drop down list, select the page style required 
and click OK.

This will give you an empty page of the style required. Place the cursor at the top of this page 
and hit delete. It will then be filled with the material of the next page in the document correctly 
formatted for the page style you inserted.

If sometime, you need to stitch two docs together and you require an unusual page number at the 
front end of the second doc, you can pre-set its number
using this sequence suggested to me a couple of years or so ago by Regina Henschel.

In this case, I wanted the Writer doc to start its numbering at page 2 so I could export it as a 
pdf and then stitch to it another pre-existing pdf page with no.1. I thought to use an off-set but 
it wouldn't work so Regina kindly showed me:

> That is the wrong tool for your purpose. Go to the very first paragraph of the page. Open the properties of that paragraph. Go to tab 
> "Text flow". Enable Breaks "Insert". Enable "With page style". Enable "Page number". Enter 2.
>
> The tool "Offset" has a totally different use case. It is used in letter for the information in the 
> footer, that this page of the letter has a following page. And for this use case it is the correct behavior, 
> that it is empty for the last page of the letter.
hth

Philip


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