hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1295.txt

Episode: 1295
Title: HPR1295: LibreOffice 07 Writer Heading Styles
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1295/hpr1295.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:08:11

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Hello, this is Ahuka, and I'm welcoming you to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
And I'm going to continue in my series on Libra Office.
Right now we're staying with Libra Office Writer, that's the word processing package, and
it is probably what is most often used by most people, that's why I'm giving it the most attention
here for the time being.
And last time we talked about paragraph, created our own paragraph style, and that's useful.
But the other thing I want to talk about now is headings, and that's an area all by itself.
Now headings are basically elements that define either a document or a section of a document.
So if you use them logically, H1 would be heading one rather, would be the title of the document.
See I slipped into H1 because that would be the HTML equivalent, H1, H2, H3, and Libra
Office Writer, it's heading one, heading two, heading three.
And I'm drawing a parallel there very deliberately.
I mentioned this in an earlier episode, and got some interesting feedback from someone
who said, no, no, no, the title of the document is the title tag, it's sort of correct.
In HTML the title tag is what is going to define how it will appear in the bookmarks
and things like that.
It is required if you're going to validate as proper HTML, so definitely use it.
But what I think the misunderstanding is that I'm focused on the actual page appearance.
So when I'm creating an HTML document, whatever is in the title tag does not actually appear
on the page itself.
And so it's not an equivalent in any way to what we're doing with Libra Office Writer.
The H1 tag is equivalent to the heading one tag.
And heading one, I would use as the title of a document, or maybe if I was writing a
book, it would be the title of a chapter.
You know, this isn't religion, so you use what makes sense, but the thing is to be logical
about it, okay?
So in the documents that I create, I create it with heading one as the title of the document.
And as I explained when I'm doing my default template, I have my default template set
that it opens automatically in heading one.
So the minute I open a new document, I am ready to go.
It is on the center of the page, it is set up for the font that I like to use and the
size of the font that I like to use and all of that.
So I'm ready to go when I want to create a new document.
So how are we going to do this?
The reason that I think it's important to be consistent is that there's a hierarchy,
okay?
This is the title of the document, heading two are main sections.
Then heading three would be subsections within a heading two.
Then heading four would be subsections within heading three and so on.
That's a logical division.
Now I do a lot of reading, I do a lot of writing and documentation, so all of this becomes
important in organizing it.
In nonfiction books, text books and things like that, other nonfiction books, I see them
using this kind of layout and arrangement.
And you can see from the different headings that you have where you are in this, is this
a major section, a subsection, that kind of thing.
So if you're going to do this, I'm going to remind you again, this is going to be a frequent
reminder.
We're going to be talking about styles, but styles live inside of templates.
And so if you're going to be talking about modifying styles, anytime you're doing that,
if you want that work to persist anywhere, it has to be saved into a template.
Now for what I'm discussing now, I'm going to suggest maybe you make that your default
template.
And we already discussed how you create a default template.
If you're a little hazy on that or if you just came late to the series, please check
the archives at Hacker Public Radio, because we did a whole program on the default template.
So open up your default template, in case you don't remember how to do that, you go to
File, Templates, Edit, and then you just, you select.
And I know which one is mine, because when I created it, I named it, you know, my default
template, you know, put my name in with default after it.
So we're going to say you now have your default template open, you're ready to do some work.
So let's go to the style window.
Now style window, something we talked about before, styles and formatting is the full
name of it.
You can get it by pressing F11.
I always have mine docked on the left side of the screen.
So every time I open Libra Office Writer, it's there.
I don't have to think about it.
It is just open as part of opening Libra Office Writer.
I've got all of my styles in the style and formatting window, and it's always docked
on the left side of the screen.
And, you know, if you're going to learn how to use this stuff like an expert, that is something
that you probably will want to do.
And so we, I think we talked about that, we talked about that when we first introduced
styles.
So if we take a look, we're going to see there is already a style called heading 1, alright?
This is part of what comes with Libra Office Writer in what I will call the out-of-the-box
experience.
It's kind of a metaphor.
I know there's no box here, but it comes with it.
And so if we right-click on the style, we can select modify, and this will bring up the
configuration window just as we saw off of the paragraph style.
But we're going to make some different choices this time because headings function differently
from paragraphs in most writings, certainly.
So let's go to the organizer tab.
On the organizer tab, we see the name is already filled in, and we don't have an option
to change it, alright?
That's because this is one of the built-in styles.
Now you do have an option in the styles and formatting window.
There's a button on the right up there at the top that says, you know, create a new style
based on this.
So if you wanted to create something and give it a different name for whatever reason,
you know, that would be a way to do it.
But here, you know, this is heading 1.
This is a very standard thing.
All the word processors use exactly the same kind of terminology for this.
So it really doesn't make sense to try and change it.
So we have heading 1, I'm fine with that.
What other options do we have?
First thing I'm going to do is make double certain that auto update is not checked.
Remember, we talked about this before.
That's one of those things that can cause you tremendous trouble if you're not careful
because you go to change one thing in a document.
If you have auto update, the whole document will change.
So you don't want to do that.
Now when I get to next style, I see it says text body.
OK, that's the way it comes configured by Libra Office.
That's not a bad choice necessarily, but it's not the choice I want.
Now, what that means is when you have typed your heading 1 and you press the enter key,
and pressing the enter key ends that object.
And whatever happens when you press enter is determined by next style.
It'll go to whatever that next style is.
So when I type in my title, I press enter, I'll go to text body.
Now, that's a style I never used.
OK, that might be good, but it's not the way I work.
I'm going to make my next style heading 2.
Again, might not work for you.
You have to figure out how your workflow is going to go here and make the choices that
are most appropriate for you.
But I make mine heading 2.
And that means that right after I type the title of my document, I plan to type the heading
of the first major section.
I do a lot of technical writing and documentation at work.
That's why I do it this way.
Now, if you do things a little differently, maybe you might want to use the paragraph style
we created previously and say, yeah, the next style after my heading 1 should be a paragraph.
That's up to you.
Now, bear in mind, this next style thing governs what writer will do automatically when
you press the enter key.
Now, you can always change that.
You can always override whatever that is by simply using the style selector box on the
formatting toolbar.
So that's how that one works.
Then in the section called linked with, I'm going to set it to none.
The reason is I explained previously is to break any inheritance problem I might have
with linked styles.
Then, go to indents and spacing.
I like to have no indent at all.
But I do insert a blank line after.
The thing with these is to be consistent.
I like to have a blank line.
That works out on mine and I'm using American measurements is 0.18 inches.
If you were in Europe, you would probably have some sort of millimeter setting and I
don't know exactly.
This is how mines can figure out just figure out what setting works for you.
Now the thing about the blank line is you have an option of having it before or after.
With the heading, the heading is going to be the first thing in the document anyway.
Why would you put a blank line before?
That just seems kind of dumb.
I have a blank line after.
Now what you want to do once you've made that choice, I think you should always use blank
line after for all of your styles because otherwise you're going to get one of those.
This style had a blank line after and the next one had a blank line before.
Now I got two blank lines in there and it just looks stupid.
So that's on the spacing thing.
For alignment on my heading one, I select centered.
It's the title of my document so it's going to be centered in the middle of the page.
That makes it nice.
For text flow, headings in general are not supposed to be long pieces of text.
Even if my heading one does go to a second line, it's centered.
I don't need any hyphenation.
If I were using heading one as a chapter title in a longer document book, whatever putting
a page break first would make sense.
But it's just the title of the document that is no need to do that.
I'm already on the first page in most cases.
As for the last section options, one would hope that widow and orphan control would not
come up.
That's not supposed to be an issue with headings.
It's supposed to be an issue with paragraphs where you have many, many lines of text.
However, keep with next paragraph is something I usually check for headings.
Now granted on a heading one, that probably doesn't come up too much.
But when you get to your heading two and heading three, that really is an issue.
It would be, again, really dumb to have your heading two as the last line on the bottom
of the page.
And then the stuff that goes with it starts on the next page.
I thought that's dumb.
So for at least for heading two and heading three and so on, keep with next paragraph
is a real good setting to have on there.
For font, I like to use sans serif for my headings.
I'm not a graphic designer.
Many my preferences would make a real designer shudder.
But it's what I find works for me.
The main point with headers is that they're generally bold and larger.
So I set my heading one to use liberation sans bold at 145%.
And I do not use any font effects nor do I use any of the other tabs to configure heading
one.
Well, what about heading two?
Much the same as heading one, but with a few differences.
So again, you right click on heading two, select modify, same as before.
The first difference comes with what the next style is going to be.
For me, the next style is going to be paragraph.
Now again, we can override that.
If I'm going to immediately go into several heading threes for different subsections,
I can always override it on the formatting bar.
But what we're doing here with next style is we're saying most of the time, what am I
going to do?
What makes the most sense generally?
So when I create my documents, I usually start typing paragraphs right after my first
heading two.
So I just say make paragraph the next one.
For indents and spacing, I again prefer no indents at all and use a blank line.
That's 0.18 inches for me after the heading.
For alignment, in this case, I use left.
Now for text flow, I do not generally put a page break before a heading two.
But I do consider it essential to check the keep with next paragraph.
So that way whatever paragraphs I start typing are always going to stay with that heading
or the heading will stay with the paragraphs more precisely.
For font, I would stick with the same font that you selected for heading one, which in
my case is that liberation sands bold.
Fencing fonts is an invitation to disaster unless you know very well what you're doing.
As I said, I'm not a graphic designer.
I don't like to take chances.
I said sticking with bold for headings always works.
Because there is a hierarchy to headings, I think that each one should look a little
bit different.
So what I do with heading two is I made it liberation sands bold.
I added italic and made it 16 points.
So it's a little bit smaller than heading one and it's got the italics.
I don't use any other tabs for headings.
So what about heading three and beyond?
I'm not going to go too much further with this.
If you don't do the kind of writing I do where sections and subsections crop up a lot.
Like I say, I do a lot of technical writing and documentation.
Heading three and the other headings are pretty much the same as heading two.
I always set the next style for paragraph.
Make sure it's not linked to anything aligned to the left.
Make sure I check keep with next paragraph.
And then the difference really is a matter of the font.
So you want to make sure it is clear which heading is which.
One way to do that is make them progressively smaller, but there is a flaw in that.
Once you go beyond a couple of levels, making it smaller is not really an option.
So at some point you either have fonts that are so close to size, you cannot clearly distinguish
them.
Or you would get to a point where the heading font is smaller than your paragraph font.
And everything we expect about headings is that they should be larger than paragraphs.
This is where you employ various tricks like mixing which ones are italic and which ones
are not.
So if my heading two was liberation sans bold italic, my heading three might be liberation
sans bold without the italic instead of 16 point, maybe make it 14 or 15 point, just
a little bit smaller.
So if you're doing this in your default template, when you save your template, all of this
will be available and set up to work in all of your future documents.
And that's a good thing.
So what's the payoff look like?
Well, let's go back to our workflow and see what we've accomplished.
If I open a document, I select heading one to put in the title.
After I type the title, I press enter, it goes to heading two automatically.
I type in the first major section heading, then press enter.
I automatically get a paragraph style set up and ready to go.
I type my paragraph, I hit enter and get another paragraph ready to go.
When I want to put in a new heading, I need to do that manually from the style selector
box, but even then it comes with all the formatting already built in.
We're already saving a lot of effort just from implementing a few simple styles.
So this is the use of headings and this is one of the essential pieces of how we do paragraph
styles.
We saw how to set up a paragraph, now we've got a heading, I've got a few more tricks
before we leave this particular topic for the time being.
But for right now, this is Ahuka signing off and reminding everyone support free software.
Thank you.
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