Episode: 1415
Title: HPR1415: 19 - LibreOffice Writer Working with Page Styles
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1415/hpr1415.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 01:08:28

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This is Ahuka and welcome to Hacker Public Radio for another and our ongoing series
on Libra Office focusing for now on writer.
And last time we took a look at page styles and how those work and what I want to do now
is I want to actually go through and exercise in using them because that is going to make
it an awful lot easier for you to understand how this technique is used in practice and
what kinds of benefits you can get from it.
So you know you can if you take a look at all of the page styles you've got the we looked
at the default page style previously and if you look at the options I think you can begin
to figure out what some of the other predefined page styles are all about.
The first page style is like the default style but you would turn off headers and footers
and maybe make a margin adjustment envelope that's pretty clear and now you know about
left and right pages that let you handle alternate pages with different formatting.
But before we get into any tweaking I want to stop and just make sure we understand
something.
If you think back to our discussion of paragraph styles one of the things we emphasized is
that all styles live within templates.
The template is the container that holds all styles and this is just as true for page
styles.
If you have a document open and you make a change to a page style you have changed it
for that one document only and it will not be there in the next document.
So if you are going to start creating or tweaking styles for your own use consider how they
will be used.
So case number one you're working on a style that will be your default or something
that you plan to reuse regularly.
Well open your default template for editing.
Make your changes and then save the default template.
Now we had a discussion of this in an earlier program so you can go back and review that
now if you are a little hazy on those details.
Now I'm going to go ahead assuming you have already created a default template we did
have a program on exactly how to do that.
If you have not created your default template by now I would say before you do anything
else go ahead and create that.
It's really important that you have a default template.
So much of what we do is just not going to work for you if you don't do that basic thing
first.
Case number two let's say you're working on a special project.
Create a template for that project and then in that with that template open create your
page styles create your paragraph styles your list style you know any style you need
create it in that template and then you will have everything you need for that project
and then save that template and it will be there.
So with that warning note let's take a look at this.
I'm going to do an example of a particular kind of special project that you might do that
is going to let us use a few of these page style techniques and show how they interact
and how you can combine them for it's actually a fairly elegant result.
So if you follow this example you will probably have learned enough to handle you know most
of the problems that you might run across.
If you ever run into something you can't figure out there is the LibreOffice users mailing
list and there's a link to that in the show notes where you can post a question and get
some help from some very smart people you know that's often where I go if I'm not clear
about something because there's people that know more about this than I do God knows.
So that's a very useful resource.
So we're going to create a template for our project we will have a first page we will
have left and right pages that are different and end note page at the end how are we going
to do all of that we'll first create the template.
Just open up LibreOffice any new document and then go to the file menu go to templates
and then save and give it a name.
So I did this sample for page styles with the name I gave mine because I'm creating
a sample alright then go to file templates and this time select edit and bring up that
style and open it for editing.
Now you could have just started editing at the previous step one of the reasons I do this
is a two step process is it gives me a chance to just verify everything you know I can go
back and see when I went looking for it that yeah I really did create it it really is on
my hard drive.
You may have more confidence in yourself than that but you know I can be a belt and suspenders
value when I want to.
Now when you open it for editing look at the very top of the page and you should see the
name that you gave it and the extension will be O T T all over Thomas Thomas and that
is the extension for a template so if you see that you'll know you've successfully created
the template and any changes you make and then save will be in that template for future
use.
Now so let's select first page we'll take the first page style right click and select
modify start with the organizer tab on the organizer tab make sure that you take a
look at that next page right now it probably says default but remember we said we were
going to have different left and right pages we will be doing two sided printing at the
end to make this work.
So imagine that the first page is like the first page of a book and that it is always on
the right when the book is open the following page will be on the left.
So what we would want to do on the organizer tab for the first page is select left as
the following style.
Then look at the other options.
On the first page I tend to make the top margin a good deal larger I want it to start a
little further down the page so I'll make the top margin two inches maybe that's not
a particular style you want to adopt but I found it works very well for me.
Then I'm thinking ahead that this is something I'm going to want to use a three hole punch
and put it in a binder and that means I want to make sure I leave a little extra room
for that.
So this is my first page is going to be essentially a right hand page so I want to add
something to the left margin to give it a little extra space for that three hole punch.
So I'll add a half inch.
That'll make it 1.29 inches on my machine obviously if you're outside the U.S. you will
have different units there'll be something in millimeters but I'm sure you can make
that adjustment.
And since it's the first page I will make sure that headers and footers are not turned
on.
Okay so now I have done what I want to do with my first page style.
Next comes the left page so I will select left page right click modify and on the first
tab the organizer tab I will make sure that the following the next page will be a right
page.
Now Libra Office probably already knows this but it just never hurts to just kind of go
through and verify this so it probably already says right page but you know verify that
it does.
Then on the page tab I'm going to leave many of the settings the way they are but I do
want to allow again for that three hole punch.
Now for a left page I need to increase the margin on the right side of the page so I will
increase that to 1.29 inches.
Since I'm using an end note page I don't need to deal with footnotes but I do want a page
number at the bottom so I will put a check mark on the footer tab to turn on my footer.
Then the right page select it right click choose modify and on the first tab make sure
that the next style says left page.
Then on the page tab I will make sure that the left side margin is increased to 1.29
inches to leave room for the punching and binding and again I turn on the footer.
Now I said we are going to have an end note here so how would I do that?
Well let's go to the end note style.
Open that for editing again you know select it right click modify blah blah blah.
On the first tab note that the next style says end note.
That makes sense because this is a separate section of the document and you will have as
many pages of end notes as you have end notes and they will just be one after the other.
So because I have multiple pages of end notes it makes sense that the next style will be
end note but there are some other considerations.
Remember all that punching and binding that we wanted to leave room for?
But we don't know ahead of time whether any given page will be left or right.
That's where we use mirrored.
So on the page tab take a look at your page layout option and select mirrored.
Your left and right margin settings now become inner and outer.
So you just select inner and make that 1.29 inches.
Libra office will keep track of where that inner margin is for any given page.
It knows whether it's a left or a right and so it can keep track of all of that.
Now one last thing before you save your template you want to start with page 1 don't you?
So with this blank page in front of you double click the first page style and that applies
it.
And because we changed the top margin to two inches you should immediately see your insertion
mark move down the page to the two inch mark which is a sign that you were successful
in doing it then just go to file save and you now have your template all set up.
So how does it work in practice?
You would go to file new templates and documents.
Select your template which should be in the my templates area and select open.
You should now see your insertion mark on a blank page at the point two inches below
the top just as we specified for the first page.
Take a look at the bottom of the screen you will see that it says first page.
Libra office is just confirming that.
Then put in a title such as sample documentation project.
Now when I do a title I always give it a heading one style.
So I would do that.
Then I will drop a couple of lines and put in my name with a heading two style.
Now if you are unclear about these heading styles again we covered that in earlier programs
you can go back and review them or go to my website at a hookah.com and look at the written
material for all of that.
Okay so we have now created our first page.
How do we get to the second page?
Well you know if you are real amateur you just keep hitting the enter key until you finally
got there.
But you are not an amateur you are becoming a ninja of Libra office writer a sensei.
So what you would do at this point is you would simply use a page break.
Go to insert, manual break and select page break and you will immediately be on the next
page ready to go.
Take a look at the bottom of the page you will see that it says left page.
Take a look at the ruler at the top you will see that the right margin is larger just
as we planned.
Now for this documentation project the sample documentation project I am going to adopt
the convention that left pages all have screenshots and right pages all have some explanatory
text that goes with it.
So insert a screenshot on my left page and then insert another page break.
Now we are on the right page.
If you look at the bottom it will say right page.
If you look at the ruler up top you can see that the left margin is now the larger one.
Remember we set it to 1.29 inches.
So I write some explanatory text and when I am done I enter another page break and I am
at the next left page.
Insert another screenshot, insert another page break.
Then write some explanatory material, insert another page break and so on.
Now I created a sample document with the work we have done so far which you can download.
There is a link in the show notes or you can find it on my website.
I didn't get into the edit notes because that is a topic for another day and so you
can download this sample file that I created and see exactly how this stuff looks when
you do it this way.
So this lesson has been a lot of first do this then you would do that but where does it
get us?
Well the real benefit is when you consider what happens if you are working on a long document.
Imagine you are trying to manually do all of this.
Well first of all writer doesn't really let you do this manually.
You have to use styles to some degree.
But more importantly by spending just a little time up front thinking about what you
would need to do and setting up your page styles you can whip through the writing without
having to stop and think about the page layout.
You did that once and it is done.
Furthermore if you look at the final product and decide the margins are not quite right
just modify the style and you are done.
But you still have all the flexibility of making left and right different.
Now here is another benefit.
Suppose you are in an organization where you have a number of people that are going to
be creating for instance documentation and you want to make sure that everyone creates
their documentation using the same styles.
You want all of these documents to look the same.
Well simply create this template distributed to everyone and tell them use this template
every time you are creating it and they will very quickly you will see that all of your
writers are turning out documents that are the same because they are all working from
the same template.
Well I think you can see that this really is a very powerful technique and can do a lot
for you and you want to start learning how to use this stuff.
So this is Ahuka and I am going to as always remind you support free software and sign
off for now.
Bye.
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