Episode: 1465
Title: HPR1465: 24 - LibreOffice Writer A Brochure Project
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1465/hpr1465.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 03:33:58

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Music
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming everyone to Hacker Public Radio, and what is for at
least the time being the last of our shows about Libra Office writer.
You know, I may come back to it for more advanced stuff later, but I'm kind of anxious to
move on to some of the other components, and so after this, we're going to be getting
into KELT. But what I wanted to do was wrap up our discussion of page layout by actually
taking you through a project. That's often a very good way of learning these things. So what
I want to do is put in a practice, the techniques that we've talked about. You know, it's a good
way to learn and also to cement them in your mind. So what I've decided to do is to actually go
through creating a simple brochure, which is the sort of thing that anyone might want to do.
And I could have just done a sample brochure of some kind for some imaginary ladies bridge club
or whatever, but I thought why not actually do one for Hacker Public Radio that my friends
here could use because, you know, they go to these conferences. And so it makes much more sense
to do something that is useful. So when we have people from Hacker Public Radio that are going
to fuzz down, or Linux con, or one of the various Linux fests, or what have you, and they've got
a table there and a banner and they're promoting the network. Wouldn't it be handy if they had a
brochure that they could easily print up a couple of hundred of these things and bring them along.
So I'm going to do that. I'm going to keep it simple. I'm going to use normal average size paper.
But I know that I've got both American and European, among others probably all over the world,
people that are following Hacker Public Radio. And there tend to be two standard sizes.
I'm going to do both. So for the first, I'm going to do an eight and a half by 11 for the United
States and then do an A4 for the rest of the world. Now for my overall layout, I'm going to use
something called a trifold brochure. Now this is the kind that has the paper in landscape oriented
and it's folded twice into thirds. You've probably seen this many times. It's a very common
sort of thing. So let's get into it. Page style. Remember that the start of any document is
the appropriate page style. You've got to have that. So take a look at page style. That's the
fourth button from the left in your styles and formatting window. When I select this, I note
there does not seem to be a style for a brochure. So I'll create one. I do see landscape, which I
know will be part of what I want to do. So I click on the landscape style to select it. Then I go to
the button on the top right that lets me create a new style from selection. And then I stop to think.
Thinking is good. As we've emphasized before, styles live inside of templates.
Would I ever want to do another brochure quite possibly? Yes.
All right. If that's the case, would it be nice if I had saved all of my work?
Yeah. Probably a pretty good idea. Right now I'm in a document. I need to be in a template.
So you've got two possible ways to go about it. I can create the style. I can open up my default
template. Create the style. Save it there. And then it's always going to be in my default template.
But I think what I really want to do here is create a template for brochures and save it there.
That's going to make it very easy in the future. So I'm going to create a template for the brochure,
which is going to contain the page style. And that way I can do this again in the future and
have a leg up on someone who's starting from scratch because I've already got some of the basic
layout already done. So where I actually begin is I go to my new document here and I go to file
save as template. In the window that opens up, I select my templates. Then click save and give it a name.
Now I decided to call mine trifolds brochure. Then really matter as long as you'll know what it is
when you see it in the future. So now I go to file new templates. Select the trifold brochure template
and click the edit button so that I can edit the template. Sounds good. And I check the title bar
up at the very top of my screen and it now reads trifold brochure.ott which is just what I wanted to see.
Now remember that in the open document specification, the ODF formatting, OD as in delta ODT is a document.
But OTT is a template. So I know that I am in fact editing the template and that's good.
So I can make any changes that I want to make and when I save this, it will save everything to my template.
Now I'll go back to what I started to do before with the page style. I select landscape,
then new style from selection and name my style trifold brochure. That's what it is after all.
Then I right click on my new page style that I've just created. Select modify and that opens up the
properties window. So first tab is a organizer and the first thing it says is, well, if I'm working
on a trifold brochure page, what will the next page be? Now these are almost always two page documents
which depending on your printer you can print both sides at once if you've got a really fancy
printer. More often you print one side, turn the paper upside down and print the other.
So either way, I want to make sure that my second page is also a trifold brochure page.
So on the organizer, I'll just say yes, the next page will be a trifold brochure.
Then I go to the page tab. My format says letter right now and that's okay for the US
when I get to doing the rest of the world edition. This is where I would change it to get A4.
But what I want to do here is make sure my orientation is landscape. For some odd reason,
it isn't but I can change it here. And I'm going to reduce my left and right margins.
Why? I'm trying to think about and if you're not used to this, get a blank piece of paper and
just start doing a little bit of layout with a pencil and you start to see how this works.
I want to have three columns going across the page.
And to be good looking, I want the columns to have symmetric margins.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to reduce my left and right margins of the page to a half inch.
For those of you in other parts of the world, I'll show you the corresponding
millimeter measurements when I get to my rest of the world adjustment.
So I don't need to use backgrounds, headers, footers, or borders. So I'm going to skip those.
But I will use columns. I select the three column format and then I add spacing between the columns
which I set to one inch. Now, imagine that the fold runs right through the middle of this one
inch space. Well, if that's the case, then on one side of the fold, you'll have half an inch
and the other side of the fold will have half an inch. And I set my page margins to be half an
inch. Aha, I have symmetry. This is a good thing. Now, I don't need to have any of these
separators printed. So I leave that set for none. Now, that's all I want to do with this style,
so I click OK. Then to apply this style to my document, and this is the standard thing for styles,
I just double click on the style in the styles and formatting window and my page immediately flips
into using this I go in a landscape mode. And I can see faintly on the page registration marks
that show me my columns. They're in a faint gray, but they're there. I can also look at the ruler
at the top and see that I've got three areas marked out for putting in text. So to test my work,
so far now that I've done this, I'll save the template by clicking the save button.
Then I go to file new templates, click on the trifold brochure, and I see a new document that is in
landscape mode has my three columns and appropriate margins and spacing. I've been successful.
Now, I need to start laying out my brochure and adding content. Now, the first problem I
encounter is that columns are designed for continuous text, but that's not exactly what I want to do
here. My brochure consists of two pages each divided into three columns, but my document does not
begin in the first column of the first page. It actually begins in the third column of the first
page, and then jumps to the first column of page two. It then goes to the rest of page two,
then jumps back to the first column of page one, and ends in the second column of page one.
If you have trouble picturing this, I suggest taking a piece of paper and folding it into thirds
to see how this works. Now, this would be very difficult to do with columns, but it is a piece of
cake with frames. In fact, what I have done is lay out the columns simply as guides for placing
my frames on the page. I won't actually use them as columns of text at all. Now, I need to put
in some content. I'm going to get all of that from the hacker public radio website, and I'm not going
to get into too much what that content is. If you've seen the HPR site, you've got a pretty good
idea, and if you want to download the brochure, you can see what I did with it. Very straightforward.
So first, I copied the hacker public radio logo, which is an image. I paste that.
It goes into the first column. That's not what I wanted. I wanted to go into the third column of page one.
What I need to do is change the anchor setting and anchor it to the page. Remember that frames
are always anchored in some way. If I anchor it to the page, I can drag and drop it to whatever
position I want, so I drag it over to the third column. Then I increased the size slightly because
I'd like something a little bit larger than what was on the website, but it's not terribly large.
This is a bitmap image. If you blow up bitmap images too much, they just really suck, so I didn't do
that. Then I center it in the column. Under that, I insert a frame for text, and copy some text from
the site. By default, the frame has a border around it, but I go to the Borders tab of the frame
properties window and set it to none, which I will do, in fact, for all frames in this document,
so just assume that none of the frames have borders. Now, if you want to have a border around a
particular frame, and there are times when that's very appropriate, by all means, you can do that,
but I don't in this particular design. Now I want to go to the second page and start work there
because that is where you go when you open the brochure. How am I going to get there?
Well, my insertion mark, if I'm not inside of a frame, is back at the beginning of column one page
one. Okay? Well, if I was really stupid, I would hit the Enter key about four million times
until it got me over to page two, but I'm not stupid. I just insert a page break.
This gives me a new page, and if you take a look at the two frames that I had previously put into
column three of page one, they didn't move because they were anchored to the page. They're not
going to move. So, good. I'll more content. On page two, I'm going to employ another technique.
I placed a text frame in the first column of page two and copied in some text, and it was way
too big for the space. I had a couple of problems. One is that the frame stretched all the way across
the page. It didn't stick inside of the column, and it was just with a mess. I had to do a little bit
of math to set the frame proportions properly, but I also realized that I had more text than I could
put into this column. And that's where frame linking comes in. So, I created a frame in column one
of page two called about HPR one, and then created a frame in column two of page two and named it
about HPR two, and then I linked them. If you go to the Options tab, if you're in the second frame,
place the name of the first frame in the previous link, or if you're in the Options tab of the first
frame, place the name of the second frame in the next link field. It doesn't matter which end you
work from. You just need to create a link between these two, and you need to specify this is the
first one, and this is the second one, so that the text knows which way to go. You will then see a
dashed line going from the bottom of the first frame to the top of the second frame.
So now I need to do the arithmetic to set the dimensions. My page is 11 inches wide,
but I have a half inch margin on either side of the page, plus a one inch separator between the
columns. That adds up to three inches, so my actual text area is eight inches, and I've got three
columns, so I divide by three, and I get 2.66 inches. So I can go in and set that as the fixed width
of the frame. In fact, I do that for all the remaining frames in this document. Now for my height,
I have a page that is eight and a half inches high, and I have margins of 0.7,
nine inches top and bottom. So I do the math, 8.5, minus 0.79, minus 0.79, and that is 6.92 inches,
and I set that as the height of my frame in column one of page two.
For the frame at the top of column two that got my overflow, I also set the width to 2.66
inches, but left the height to auto size, so it would fit the rest of the text I copied.
Now, I already knew that I had more text than would fit. Suppose you had copied in all of your text,
and discovered that it was more than would fit, and you hadn't previously made arrangements,
well then just add another frame and link them, and it'll be smart enough to move that text over for you.
So then I just kept going adding frames and text to fill out the page, but another thing that
is kind of interesting, I'll just mention, when I got to the end of column three on page two,
I created another link back to column one of page one. So if any text overflowed from the last
column on page two, it would continue on the first column of page one, which is what I wanted,
of course. I then filled out the rest of the brochure with more content.
Now, if this thing about column three of page two, going to column one of page one,
if it's confusing, again, take a piece of paper, fold it in thirds, and I think you'll start to see
what we're talking about here. This is the way text would normally flow in a trifold brochure.
Well, how good was my work? Let's test it.
Best way, print a copy of page one, flip it over, print page two.
Now, when you do this, it may take you a couple of tries to figure out which way
to put the paper in when you flip it because of how it feeds into the printer and all of that,
so you might need to do a couple of test runs to figure that out.
But other than that, it works great. And if you really have one of those printers that will
print both sides in a single go, then so much the better, you don't need to worry, it'll take
care of it for you. Now, that was the American format. What about the European?
My document was done using American units. My paper was the letter size paper that is 8.5
by 11 and all of my measurements were in inches. Actually, it's not that hard to make the adjustment.
I just needed to change the paper type and redo some measurements.
So I saved my original with a suffix of US and then saved another copy with a suffix of EU
for European and then worked on that. Now, the corresponding standard paper size for European
users is called A4. It measures 8.3 by 11.7 inches. But we really should do this in millimeters
if we're going to do it. So the measurements there are 297 by 210 millimeters.
But I have a problem in that my computer is all set up to use inches. Well,
not a problem. I can change that. So I go to Tools, Options, Libra Office Writer, General,
and then in the Settings area, I change my Measurement Unit to Millimeter. Simple as that.
And when I'm done, I'll just go there again and change it back to inches.
So in my EU version, I first go to the Page Style of the trifold brochure, right-click,
Select Modify. And then I go to that format that I mentioned before and change it from letter
to A4. And my units now show a width of 297 and a height of 210. Remember, I'd already set this
to landscape in my previous document. I'm just modifying it now, so it still thinks it's landscape,
which is good. So as soon as I click OK, I see all my nicely placed frames are,
well, they're not where they're supposed to be. They were anchored to the page, but now the page
itself has different dimensions, and I need to make an adjustment. Looking at my margins,
left and right are now 12.7 millimeters. Top and bottom are 20 millimeters.
I hang onto that information. And jump to the columns tab where I see the space between
the columns is 25.4 millimeters, which is exactly twice the margin. Excellent. All I need to do now
is adjust my sizes on my frames, reposition them slightly, and I've got a European version.
Again, a little math. My page is 297 millimeters wide. I have left and right margins of 12.7 millimeters.
Two column separators of 25.4 millimeters. So my horizontal content area is 297
minus 12.7 for the left margin. Minus 12.7 for the right margin. Minus 25.4 for the first column
separator minus 25.4 for the second column separator. The answer is 220.8 millimeters.
I got three columns, so I divide by three. I get 73.6 millimeters. So that's going to be the width
of each of my frames. And for height, I need to keep it to 210 minus 20 for the top margin minus 20
for the bottom margin. So 170 millimeters. So all I have to do is just go into the frame properties
for each frame, put in the appropriate dimensions. And then all I have to do is a little drag and drop
to get things back into their proper positions. And it looks lovely. So I have in the show notes
put links to both of these, the European and the American version, which you are free to download
and use. And I hope all of my HPR friends who go to conferences or what have you will print
up a few of these and take them along. And so wrapping up for now our discussion of Libra Office
Writer, this is Ahuka reminding everyone to support free software. Thank you.
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