hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1395.txt

Episode: 1395
Title: HPR1395: 17 - LibreOffice Writer Overview of Page Layout Options
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1395/hpr1395.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:45:05

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Alright, here we go.
Hello, this is a welcome to Hacker Public Radio and our ongoing series on Libra Office
focusing for now on writer. We're now getting into the last block of material and it'll be a number
of shows but what I want to do now is I want to get into the whole issue of page layout and I'm
going to look at a number of things involved with page layout and when we finish that I'm going to
move on for the time being to another part of Libra Office which is Calc the spreadsheet program.
I know there's a lot of people been waiting for that and we want to get there and give them something
to look at. Now page layout the thing that I think you want to bear in mind about all of this is that
Libra Office writer is more than just a simple word processor. In fact it could very well be viewed
as a desktop publishing program to some degree. It's probably not quite as all-encompassing as a
professional level program for that but it gets you a fair piece of the way there and you've
got a lot of very advanced options for doing your page layout. So I want to take a look at those
and let's see how all of these things work. If you're just doing a one-page memo or a letter or
something like that, it may not matter to you all that much but you would still want to know at
least some of this stuff like page styles and things like that but what if you're going to create a
newsletter? You know, newsletters typically have a little bit more complex layout. Are you going
to do it in multiple columns? Do you want to include pictures, graphical images of some kind?
Do you want text to flow around the pictures? Do you want text boxes to call out special
information and have other text flow around the boxes? What about shaded or colored backgrounds?
I'm just a few of the things that you might be thinking about in terms of page layout and
fortunately, a labor office writer can handle all of these things. So what are the topics that we
want to talk about for page layout? The first one is page styles. Page styles are what if you were
using Microsoft Word, you would probably call those page properties. Same kind of things. So you're
going to get into stuff like your page orientation, portrait versus landscape. Where are the margins?
What about headers and footers, text columns, backgrounds, all of that are handled in page styles.
Another technique is using tables. Now, we call this invisible tables because the table is used
to lay out things on the page, but then you make the cell borders invisible. So that when you go
to print the document, no one has any idea how you did it. You can get fairly complex with that.
You create all of these cells and you start putting different bits of content in each of the cells.
You can even become recursive about it. Take one cell of a table and insert a table into that cell.
And then you can take a cell of that second table and insert a table into that.
It's turtles all the way down. So you get a pretty complex layout. It's not easy to do. You really
have to be fiddling with it. Now, this is a technique that a lot of people who were doing websites
10 or 12 years ago were probably doing that a lot until the web kind of grew up and they said,
this is really stupid. One of the reasons that they don't do it anymore is that tables imply
some kind of a function that you're supposed to have tabular data in them. That's why one does
tables. And if you're using them for some other reason, you're violating the separation
of content and presentation kind of thing, which the W3C hates. So that has in fact been deprecated
in favor of using cascading style sheets and things like that that can also handle your page layout
on a web page. And of course, these days most of us are probably using a fairly sophisticated
program of some kind. I happen to use WordPress, but there are even things like Drupal and
Jumla that you can use to do your page handling. Another technique for page layout is something
called frames. And, you know, frames is a style. If you think back to the styles and formatting
window and the five different buttons that you have, we've already looked at three of them.
One was paragraph styles, another was character styles, another one was list styles. We've already
covered all three of those. The two styles remaining are page styles and frame styles.
So we're going to get to both of those in this section. Now frames are used to insert text or
graphics on a page and control where they appear. So you can use frames to wrap text around an
object. You can link frames to have text from one page, continue several pages further on.
You know, like in the magazine when you're reading an article and it says continued on page 124,
you know, you can do techniques like that with frames. They're like text boxes, but they're text boxes
on steroids. I remember once working with a friend of mine, Matt Enders from the Sunday morning
Linux review and Matt at one time had a consulting business with some schools, private schools
that he was helping with the IT. One of the things that he asked me about was that he was trying
to get them to try Libra Office to save some money. And one of the things that came back was one
of the secretaries there. So I can't do it because there are no text boxes. And I explained that,
oh yeah, there are. They're called frames. So it's really just a difference in the terminology
that you use. The functionality, in fact, the frames in Libra Office do far more than a simple
text box. So that's something that you definitely want to understand how to use those.
Columns. All right. This is this is the way newspapers and most magazines are laid out.
And that you can divide a page into two or more columns. And the reason you do that is to
improve readability. There have been studies that take a look at how long should a line be
to enable the reader to easily understand what it is that they're reading. And the fact is,
if a line goes on too long, that becomes a problem. That's why, for instance, if you take a look at
a blog or a website for people to write things, that's usually divided into columns because it
just makes everything make so much more sense that way. So if you've got a line that has 12, 14
words going across, that's probably just about as long as you ever want it to get.
So if you have a wide page, particularly imagine if you were doing something that was in Landscape
mode, understanding how to use columns is very important. One of the nice things about columns is
you can do what magazines and newspapers do. And that is to have the text flow from the bottom of
the first column to the top of the second column. So imagine if you were trying to deal with all
of that manually, what a mess that would be. So you want to understand how columns work.
And finally, there's a sections. And this is something you see in all major word processing programs.
And that allows you to divide your document into particular sections. And one of the things you
can do is you can have different formatting in each section, if you wish. Change the margins.
You know, indent the text. You can do any number of things with sections. So we want to take a
look at that. Now we're going to cover each of these individually. But the thing that you have to
understand is that you often use these things together. And I'm going to see if I can come up with
something at the end to tie this all together and do sort of an example, like a newsletter or
something. So you know, you might start with a page style. And then you're going to put in some
columns. And then, you know, in a few places, you want to add frames and so on. And that's really how
you use all of these techniques and practice. You take all the individual pieces and fit them
together into something that controls the overall layout of the page. So we're going to take a look at
each individually. Give you a little bit of an idea of how this stuff works. And please bear in
mind as with everything we're doing here, we're really only scratching the surface. You know, you
can always dive into this and get a much deeper understanding of these things. But this is going
to be a good way to let you, you know, at least get started with all of this and give you a
foundation for moving forward. So with that, this is a hook up. And I want to just remind everyone
to support free software. And I'll see you again on Hacker Public Radio. Bye.
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