Episode: 1455
Title: HPR1455: 23 - LibreOffice Writer Other Page Layout Options
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1455/hpr1455.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 03:20:44

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Bye-bye!
Hello, this is Ahuka, and welcoming all of you to Hacker Public Radio for the next
in our series of tutorials on labor office, writer, is still the topic, but we're getting
very close to the end.
What I want to do now is continue our discussion of page layout options.
We had looked at page styles, and remember, page styles is one of those things you really
have to use, there's really no way of getting around it.
If you don't make a conscious choice, you'll just wind up with the default page style that
you have to have one.
And we looked at frame styles, an extremely useful technique, and if you're going to get
in a serious page layout, there's really no way to do it without using frames.
It is the way to go with this.
But that's not to say that there aren't a few other techniques that we can talk about
here, and I want to make sure they're covered because there are times when they just
happen to be a really good way of doing things.
So let's take a look at some of these.
The first one I'll talk about is tables.
Now, if you look functionally at tables, a purist would say tables should only be used
for tabular data.
Yeah, that's in many respects true, but sometimes it's just the best way to get something done.
So you can place a different object in each cell of a table, and give you some control
over how things are laid out on the page.
You could, for instance, place your subheads in a left-hand column and the associated text
in an adjoining column, which gives you much the same effect as using marginalia styles
with frames.
You can add pictures, charts, and other objects.
You can even insert a table into a cell of another table if you want to get more fine-grained
to control.
In fact, in the days before cascading style sheets and JavaScript tables were the primary
way of laying out web pages.
These days, that's really very much frowned upon, and, of course, most web pages now are
created using some sort of content management software, such as WordPress, which is what
I use, Drupal, which my wife is struggling to learn.
And so in cases like that, you really don't need to dig into the HTML so much.
Still good to know.
Now the idea of using tables was more attractive when we realized that you could turn off the
cell borders and make them invisible.
So that gives you the effect of placing things on a page, and it may not be obvious to
anyone just how you did it.
Now if you do that in Libra Office Writer, the thing that we want to bear in mind is
you can turn off the borders for printing.
But if the document is you electronically, they're going to see the borders.
They may be a light gray, but they're going to be there.
And as indeed, they would have to be because you couldn't edit the document if you couldn't
see what the heck was going on there.
So this is a useful technique.
In fact, the other day I was talking to someone, another one of our hacker public radio people
who had a particular problem.
And when we dug in the problem, and I think this had to do with creating invoices where
you had to line up something on the left with something on the right and make sure everything
lined up properly.
And this really ended up being just the simplest possible way of getting it done.
You could do it with frames, but that ends up probably being overkill for what this guy
wanted to do.
So a very useful technique.
Now, there are some serious limitations to using tables, however.
And that would lead to the conclusion that in general, you're probably better off using
frames.
And I would encourage everyone to really get used to using frames so that you don't box
yourself into a corner.
This fellow I was talking to on hacker public radio who had this invoice problem had originally
stumbled on a some way to make it work in word perfect using columns.
And the problem was he didn't know any other way to do it.
And so he kind of got stuck.
And so when I pointed out that, well, you know, that's not really the right way to do it
in the first place.
So let's get back to understanding what your options are.
We're able to get them out of that corner.
And so I think it's good to know all of these techniques.
So what's wrong with using tables for all your page layout?
What are the limitations?
Well the first one is you cannot flow text around objects when they're in tables.
You can with frames, I can embed a picture in the middle of the document and have text
flow around either side or both sides very easily.
Can't do that with the table.
You cannot link table cells together, the way you can link frames to have text flow from
one place to another seamlessly.
You end up having to, if you do it with tables, it's all manual.
You're not going to get any assistance from the software in this.
So if you start typing and you realize, okay, I filled this cell over full.
I need to move some of this to the next cell.
You kind of have to manually do that.
Now with frames, you can say here's the size of the frame.
And if the text keeps going, here's a frame that it's linked to and just continue the
text in that frame.
I'm going to use that technique in our next episode.
With tables, the largest element determines the size of a row or column.
So if you have something that's really wide, the whole column is going to be wide.
If you have something that's really tall, the whole row is going to be tall.
And that can end up with a lot more white space than you really want on the page.
So that's just a few of the limitations of using tables to do this.
So I do recommend learning to use frame styles, but it doesn't hurt to have this in your
tool kit.
Now another one I mentioned a moment ago, columns.
Now you can find columns as a feature within page styles or in frame styles.
Both of them can be set up to display columns.
And it deserves a little bit of a look of its own here, even though it is a feature on
both page and frame styles.
Just let you start entering text in the left column and have that text flow continuously
into the right column if you had a two column set up.
It is a great way to do things like magazines and newspapers if you think about how text
flows there.
And one of the reasons that they divide those into columns instead of going all the way
across the page is that usability studies have indicated that it becomes harder to
grasp the text if the line is too long.
You really improve readability by limiting the horizontal line length.
That makes it easier for the eye to take in what is going on.
And so on a page, if you divide it into two or three columns, and most magazines, it's
probably two columns in newspapers, depending on the size of the sheet, it might be six
or eight columns.
Now, this is good.
If you want the text to flow continuously, columns are not good if you want to link text
from one page to another in interesting ways, such as I'm going to do in our next tutorial.
As long as the text is continuous, columns can work great.
For example, if you want to do a trifold brochure, you set a page style for landscape orientation,
set it for three equally spaced columns and start writing the brochure.
Now if you just want one page of a long document to be in columns, you don't want to set
a page style for columns because the page style is going to apply to the entire document.
So what you would do then is you put in a frame on that page and in that frame, divide
it into columns, that's one of the ways you could do that, certainly.
And that way you would just have the columns applied within that frame and not for the rest
of the document.
Oh, I said that was one of the ways you could do it.
The other way is sections.
Now what sections are about in a document is it allows you to define a certain part of
the document to use different formatting.
So we know that if we define a page style for the document by default, it applies to
the entire document.
Well, what if you want to have a part of the document formatted differently?
Well, the best way to do that is to put in a section because what you can do is set
off that section and put in a different kind of style.
You can have different margins.
You could add headers or footers that you don't see in the rest of the document.
Add a background graphic or color not found in the rest of the document.
So to create a section, go to insert section and then you'll get a properties window.
And the first thing it's going to say is you can give a name to a section.
This is a really good idea, particularly if you're working on a long document.
When people do, I just got an inquiry via email the other day from someone with a 600
page document who had a question about how do I fix a problem here?
And without going into all the details, the answer was, well, if you did it right from
the beginning, it's easy.
If you did it wrong, you've just learned an expensive lesson.
So give a name to your section because in a long document, if you're going into the navigator
later on, and all you see is section one, section two, section three, section four, and you
got a bunch of sections in your document, you don't know what the heck any of them are.
Not terribly helpful.
In fact, I'm going to talk about giving names to frames is also a good idea.
And I'm going to talk about that in our next lesson.
So give it a name.
Then you can go into the rest of the settings and you can give it columns, have particular
indents.
In fact, you can change just about any of the page properties, but just for this section.
Now another interesting feature is linking.
Linking lets you embed another document in the current document.
And in fact, if that other document also has a section and you only want to embed that
section, you can do it as well.
But that's only if that other document already has a section set up that you can identify.
You can't create a section from the other document from this particular location.
Now I mentioned Navigator and probably a full discussion of this will be useful at some
point.
But for the moment, this is a good way of finding your way around in a very long document
if you gave appropriate names to things.
So if you go to View Navigator, you open the Navigator window, scroll down to where you
see sections and double click on the section name, it'll put your insertion mark at the beginning
of that section.
Very useful because otherwise you don't really see any visible sign in your document for
sections.
So this is a good thing to know.
So with that, this is a hookah and we have coming very near the end of our discussion
of Libra Office writer at least for the time being.
So I'm going to sign off now and remind everyone as always to please support FreeSoftware.
Bye.
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