hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1405.txt

Episode: 1405
Title: HPR1405: 18 - LibreOffice Writer Page Styles Introduced
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1405/hpr1405.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:56:40

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Let's think about something else first.
Hello, this is Ahuka, and welcome to Hacker Public Radio, an ongoing series on Libra
Office, focusing for now on Libra Office Writer.
And we now want to move on to page styles, which is the first of our page layout items
that we need to discuss or methods for laying out pages.
And page styles is one of the five types of styles that are available to you in the
styles and formatting.
So as we've said many times before, I tend to keep my styles and formatting window open
and docked on the left side.
I've gotten used to it, works well for me, and it means I'm never tempted to do something
other than use the styles to do what I want to do.
So page styles is one of those options.
And what does that do?
Well, page styles are how Libra Office Writer controls the, on the macro level, the page layout
options.
And this includes determining which elements should appear on each page.
For instance, page numbers, headers, footers, where are these things going to appear?
How big are the margins?
What is the orientation of the page is it landscape or portrait?
So what size paper are you going to use?
So page styles, they're going to let you control all of that.
And including some of the more advanced techniques, very often, for instance, the first page is
going to look different from all the subsequent pages.
So if you're putting in page numbers, most of the time people don't put a page number
on the first page, but they'll put it on page two and then all subsequent pages.
So that's a useful thing to know.
One of the things I like to do in a corporate environment, very often, the documents that
you create are stored on network drives somewhere.
And just where they're stored, I don't know how anyone else deals with this.
Every place I've been, usually people have a variety of different network drives.
And figuring out just where something was stored can just drive you nuts.
If you go looking for a document, I know I saved it somewhere, but where the heck is it
on drive R?
Is it on drive S?
You know, in a Windows environment, you're going to have everything as letter drives.
So what I do is, in the footer of the document, it's just a habit that I have, is I add a
little item that gives the path for the document.
So every time a document gets printed, I know exactly where it is.
And so I can find it, or if I'm in a work group with three or four other people, and one
of them wants an electronic copy for some reason, just look at the bottom of the page and
they know exactly where to go.
So that's some of the stuff you can do with page styles.
How do we get going with it?
Take a look, it's the fourth tab in the Styles and Formatting window.
So when you go there, you will see page styles that do come predefined in Libra Office
Writer.
And that's a good place to start.
Every type of style, there are some default predefined ones.
And what you can do when you start understanding them is take those as a starting point and
then create your own, which you can then save and use over and over.
That's good.
So what are some of the styles?
First of all, you've got the default style.
This is just like the default template when you first install Libra Office that says,
you haven't told me anything different, so all my pages are going to open this way.
So this is at the page style you get when you open a document and every page will be in
the default format if you never choose a different one.
So you can accept the default style that Libra Office gives you, or you can get in and modify
it if that works better for you.
And then at that point, every time you create a document, every page that you create is going
to have that format unless you choose a different one.
So what I would probably do, for instance, in my default template, I would go into the
footer and I would put in that little bit of code that says what's the path to the document
and make that part of my default template.
That's that way I don't have to think about manually adding it every time I create a document.
It's just going to be there by default.
Another type of page style ends note and footnote.
So these are two options for particular academic papers.
And if you haven't figured it out, the heritage of Libra Office is one that comes from an
academic environment.
Star Office is the original Star Office was created in Germany and was created as something
that you could give to students and schools.
So it has that kind of a heritage and note and footnote are in there.
And any document where you need to provide additional information without breaking the
flow of the main text, you can make use of this.
Another default, I mean, another pre-built style is envelope.
This is a special page size.
It's the size of the envelope, but this is going to allow you to print your envelopes directly
from Libra Office Writer and pull in stuff like the address and what have you.
First page.
This lets you specify one layout for the first page that's different from subsequent pages.
For instance, the first page might contain a logo at the top.
This is very often used for letters and subsequent pages probably do not have a logo.
The documents, they will have page numbers, but they won't put page numbers on the first
page.
So the first page would not have that particular bit of code.
There is a style for HTML.
If you are using Writer to create web pages, you could use the HTML page style.
Frankly, I would never use Writer to create web pages.
That's not what the tool is really good at.
You can do it.
You're probably not going to be terribly happy with the results compared to much more sophisticated
tools that we all have available to us.
For page style index in books commonly or for very long documents, you might want to
have some pages of index at the end that will allow people to quickly look up references.
This particular topic appears at six different places in the document and I can go there and
check out what is said.
Landscape.
This flips the orientation generally for most people the default is portrait.
That means that the vertical dimension is longer than the horizontal dimension, but if
you want to flip it so that it's wider than it is tall, then you're going to landscape.
You can use the landscape page style.
Left page and right page.
This is particularly useful for books, but it can be for any multi-page document where
you want different features for odd and even pages.
Let's say, for instance, you were going to bind the pages in some way.
You'd want to allow a little extra margin where the binding is going to go.
This would allow you to do that and then you could say, well, the page numbers for left
hand pages go on the left and right hand pages that goes on the right and stuff like that.
These are all options that you get out of the box in their pretty general.
When you get used to using page styles, you probably want to modify some of these and create
others as needed.
You should note that some of these styles, although they are page styles, do not control
the entire page.
For example, footnotes are commonly placed on the bottom of the page and are usually
in a different font size from the main text.
Vibra Office Writer lets you write your text, create footnotes as needed, and it will
handle the layout automatically using the settings you give it.
You can control how much space the footnote area can have on each page, for instance,
so that your page won't look like one line of text with the rest all footnotes.
Please understand, automatic settings can only do so much.
If your footnotes are that extensive, maybe you should switch to end notes so that your
main text remains readable.
One thing that puzzles new users to Vibra Office that come from a different office suite,
which is the one produced in Redmond, Washington, USA, is that if they look in the file
menu and see properties, they don't see any of the things they are used to finding,
like setting margins or setting the page orientation.
This is in Vibra Office, that is not where it is.
This is a big difference.
For instance, when we learned paragraph styles and character styles, we emphasized that
you should use these.
But if you insisted, you could actually apply formatting directly in bypass styles if you
really wanted to.
But with page styles, there is no such thing as direct formatting.
You really have to work with the styles to get where you're going.
If you start clicking through the menus looking for any other option, you might stumble across
in the format menu, something called page.
If you clicked that, you know what you get?
The default page style properties.
So, page style properties.
So assume you have your styles and formatting window anchored to the left side of your screen.
To take a look at what you can do with the page style, select the fourth button, page
styles, then highlight the first entry, default, right click on it, and select modify to open
the properties window.
By now, this should feel very familiar since we have done the exact same thing with paragraph
styles, character styles, and list styles.
So you're going to see a window, and at the top, it's going to say page style, default,
and then it's going to have a number of tabs.
The first one is the organizer tab.
Pretty familiar.
Remember how with paragraph styles, one of the things you could do was give a name, but
if it was a predefined style, you didn't have the option of changing it.
Well, same thing here.
If you're looking at a style that has already built into the office, you cannot change the
name.
But if you create one of your own, you can give it whatever name you want.
Again, it has a thing says next style, and it's just like what we saw with paragraph styles
earlier.
Remember how with a paragraph, when you hit the enter key, what will the next thing
be?
And you could define that here.
Here it's much the same thing.
You can say, what will the next page style be?
When you get to working with left and right, this really pays off, and you can do something
here.
Or if you were doing a first page style, you could then say, well, after I get done with
the first page, with page one, then I'll go to my default page style for everything
after that.
So second tab, page, all right, well, this is the stuff that you might have been looking
for if you're looking for page properties in the file menu.
You're going to see what kind of paper is it.
Is it letter size?
What's the width?
What's the height?
Is it portrait or landscape?
You've got a printer tray setting.
You can set your margins, how the pages are laid out.
That's all in the page.
Now for format, you can select both American and European paper types, envelope types, etc.
You can make the directions precise.
Now I happen to be in the United States.
My format is a letter format and it's 8 ½ inches by 11 inches and it's set up for portrait.
That's pretty standard.
If you're in Europe instead of letter, it would probably say a for or something like that.
You can set all four margins independently.
Generally, unless you're doing something specific
that requires it, you would probably be well advised
to keep them consistent.
So if you want one inch, then make it one inch
all the way around.
My default is actually says 0.79 inches,
which is roughly 4.5 of an inch.
Now, you can also in page layout, you can have right and left.
And this one we get into using left and right pages,
we're going to start seeing where the layout settings give you
some interesting things.
If you have right and left selected, that means every page
will have the same margins no matter what the page.
And mirrored, on the other hand, would be a good choice
if you were going to bind the printed output.
If you select mirrored, instead of left and right,
the margins become renamed as inner margin and outer margin.
So you can make the inner margin a bit larger creating space
for the binding while still having readable pages.
The only left and only right are special cases
where you can have different formatting.
And we're going to take a look at an example.
Here's something to think about.
If you were doing some documentation for someone,
say a software program, consider a document
where on the left side you have screenshots.
And on the right side, you have text
that explains the screenshots.
So left and right are very different kinds
of things going on here.
So you can independently format those.
And then you want to be very careful about in the Organizer tab,
organizing it to what is the next page style going to be.
So if you're on a left page, the next style should be right.
If you're on a right page, the next style should be left.
OK, background tab lets you select a color, for instance.
Or use a graphic for your background.
The border tab lets you apply a border to the text area,
either all around or specifying which sides get a border.
I would say background and borders are
kind of specialized things.
You wouldn't use them frequently.
But it's OK that you know that they're there.
Header and footer tabs are pretty similar
and are really just making sure that you
have the header or footer area available to you.
So you turn them on, determine, do I want them to be the same
for left and right pages?
This is where you can make an exception for the first page.
You could, if you wish, draw a border around the header
and footer and so on.
Columns, that's where you turn on columns for each page.
And decide whether you want one column, two, three.
How wide should each column be?
I mean, you know, they don't have to be the same width.
You could have the first column be narrow and the second one be wide.
Whether you'd want to is another thing, but you can.
Footnote.
Footnote is for deciding if you want to have a footnote area
on each page.
Now, a footnote area is not the same as a footer, okay?
A footer lives at the very bottom and is sort of outside
the page margin.
That's where page numbers would go.
You always, you would put your page numbers
in a footer generally.
A footnote lives within the page margin
and is generally separated from the main text in some way.
So this tab let you control how much of the page
can be devoted to the footnote area.
It could take up the entire page area
or you can limit the space it can take up.
As I said before, if you have extensive and lengthy footnotes,
you might want to consider using an end note page instead.
So I think we've done a pretty good job of taking a look
at an overview of page styles
and seeing how the page styles are handled.
So with that, I'm going to close it off as always
by reminding you to support FreeSoftware
and bye-bye for now.
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