[Issue] Automatically inserted pages and page numbering

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derpflanz
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[Issue] Automatically inserted pages and page numbering

Post by derpflanz »

I created a document, that makes no use of dual side printing or left/right pages. Still, when exporting to PDF or printing, it inserts empty pages. I know how to suppress them, but my question is: is it possible to disable the automatic insertion completely? Main problem is that the 'total number of pages' is incorrect if you suppress these pages when printing. I can see the page numbering jump from 1 to 3, changing from one page to the next (different page styles).

I read something about chapter styles, that should always be on an odd numbered page (according to the help page), but I can not find where to change that. Is it hardcoded?
Last edited by Hagar Delest on Mon Jun 09, 2008 5:45 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Reason: Tagged thread as Issue (link to a bug report).
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floris v
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Re: Automatically inserted pages

Post by floris v »

Chapter styles don't really exist as a separate class. But you can link paragraph styles, especially the Heading 1 etc. styles, with page styles, so that you can force a new chapter to start on an odd page: select the Text flow tab, check Insert, check With Page Style and select the page style you want. If you don't want it to start on an odd page, just select Page and Before in the obvious list boxes.

If this solves your problem, please edit the first post of this thread (Edit button) and add [Solved] to the subject line.
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Hagar Delest
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Re: Automatically inserted pages

Post by Hagar Delest »

derpflanz wrote:is it possible to disable the automatic insertion completely?
No, it isn't. But there are workarounds to get the right total page number.

Could you give us more detail (and/or attach a file here)? Why do you use different page styles?
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derpflanz
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Re: Automatically inserted pages

Post by derpflanz »

I use different page styles for "First Page", "Approval" (where the client can put his signature), contents, and "Default". They differ in layout and footer/header.

I experimented a little bit extra and found out that I could fix the problem by setting the 'next page style' in the style. Before, it was set as a page break with new style, in the chapter paragraph style. It seemed like the page breaks inserted the empty pages.

Unfortunately, I cannot send any document, as it is confidential information.
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Hagar Delest
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Re: Automatically inserted pages

Post by Hagar Delest »

I don't really see what's the difference between a page break with new style and the next style field of the page style (except what I've said at the end of the Page numbering tutorial: Possible issues).

Can you upload a sample file replacing any information by dummy text (just keep the page layout)?
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foxcole
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Re: Automatically inserted pages

Post by foxcole »

Hagar de l'Est wrote:I don't really see what's the difference between a page break with new style and the next style field of the page style
The "next style" on the Organizer tab of the page style just tells Writer what page style should support text once the new page is required. It does not insert a page break, so it does not force a new page. It flows to a new page.

A page break with a new style, of course, does force a new page. If you specify a page style after the break, and the page you just finished is that same style, the other style that would have come between them may be accounted for as a blank page. The typical scenario for this is a left page--right page alternating sequence. (If there is no alternating sequence, Writer makes no assumptions about whether the new page needs to be an odd-numbered page.)

Depending on the page layout settings for each of the page styles used, whether any are "mirrored" or whether they are "left page only" or "right page only" or "left and right" it could be possible for Writer to interpret a page style after a break to be a right page.
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Hagar Delest
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Re: Automatically inserted pages

Post by Hagar Delest »

foxcole wrote:If you specify a page style after the break, and the page you just finished is that same style, the other style that would have come between them may be accounted for as a blank page.
Yes I see but as the OP has not used such left or right page style, there should not have been any rule to follow. Or was derpflanz not precise enough in his description?
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Re: Automatically inserted pages

Post by derpflanz »

I created a document that has the problem. I also found out that it has to do with page numbering. If I insert the page break with page number 0, there is no problem, if I insert it with page number 1, it does. I do want the page numbering to restart, to create sections. I do *not* want the empty pages.
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Hagar Delest
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Re: Automatically inserted pages

Post by Hagar Delest »

You can't avoid that behavior. OOo follows the rule: first page is odd and right, all even pages are left and all odd ones are right (like in a book).

You can only set the blank pages not to be printed. For the numbering, you'll have to follow the last tip of that thread: [Tutorial] Page numbering - Tips.

I thought there was a report in the issue tracker requesting the possibility to deactivate that rule in the user preferences but can't find it.
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Re: Automatically inserted pages

Post by JeffreyTBest »

This is such a horrible bug. After three years of trials with OpenOffice across three organisations, and much expense working around the many failings of the mail merge functionality, this bug, which suggests arrogance and inflexibility on the part of developers, is the last straw and I am about to cancel the trials. I no longer consider OpenOffice Writer to be fit for purpose in a business environment.

I cannot believe that the developers would embed such a ridiculously inflexible rule. Why do odd numbers have to be on a right-hand page? Have they not heard of leaflets and booklets, where the first right-hand page is used for a cover and the content starts immediately overleaf?

I have now wasted far too much time and paper trying to get an Annual Report, that has to go to all the members of one organisation, in a simple, efficient, economic leaflet format. Automatically inserting blank pages that are not asked for is dumb. Having no *effective* way to turn it off is even dumber. The check boxes in the various options pages do *not* turn off this behaviour. I am using 2.4.0 on XP, but the behaviour is the same on my SuSE Linux box, which is using a slightly older version. I appear to have two unacceptable choices. Either I can have the page numbers I want, but I have to waste paper (and, as a result, pay more in postage), or I can have the paging I want, but the page numbering is broken. I am taking the third option, which is to reinstate Microsoft Word on the XP boxes.
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Hagar Delest
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Re: Automatically inserted pages

Post by Hagar Delest »

Even if this is not a bug, I fully agree with you. So after searching the Issue Tracker, I've actually filed a new one, let's see what say the devs. Feel free to vote for it and/or add comments: Issue 88361 - Disable even=left/odd=right page rule to avoid page numbering issues.
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Re: Automatically inserted pages

Post by acknak »

I know this is a problem--I've bumped into it myself--but I still don't understand exactly what the problem is.

E.g. here's a version of derpflanz's document that has
... different page styles for "First Page", "Approval" (where the client can put his signature), contents, and "Default". They differ in layout and footer/header.
It has no extra pages that I can see.

What am I missing?
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Hagar Delest
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Re: Automatically inserted pages

Post by Hagar Delest »

The For approval page has a page break at first paragraph with a numbering restarting at 1. As this page is the 2nd of the "real pages", it should be on a left page. Since numbering is restarted at 1, OOo has inserted a blank page. And if you insert the total page count, you get 3 instead of 2.

Your document is fine because your second page is 2. Restart it at 1 and you get an extra page, so your page count is now 6 instead of 5.
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Re: Automatically inserted pages

Post by acknak »

Right. I see now.

So even if you don't print the blank pages, and you force the page numbers to be correct, the page count is still wrong because it includes the blank pages. You can fake the page count using a PAGE-number_of_blank_pages formula, but, wow, that's awful.

Thanks Hagar!
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Hagar Delest
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Re: Automatically inserted pages

Post by Hagar Delest »

Good news: the issue has been accepted!

So let's vote for it.
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tankoalhadji
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Re: [Issue] Automatically inserted pages and page numbering

Post by tankoalhadji »

Hi,
I would like to know if there is any experiance as to how long it will take to get this bug fixed? Are we talking weeks or months?
I have to hand in some papers for uni and would love to get everything done without using to much extra effort. Because if it takes too long to fix this bug, I will have to go back and just use default page styles and work manually on them - which defy's to point of oOo.
By the way I have not understood why oOo works this way? Is it not easier to add a blank page if one wants to use the book style rather than somehow try and get rid of one page if writing a sientific paper?

Thanks for you help
Felix
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Hagar Delest
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Re: [Issue] Automatically inserted pages and page numbering

Post by Hagar Delest »

tankoalhadji wrote:I would like to know if there is any experiance as to how long it will take to get this bug fixed? Are we talking weeks or months?
Sadly, it may be months at least. Except if the fix is really easy.
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paenson
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Re: [Issue] Automatically inserted pages and page numbering

Post by paenson »

Well, there is a logical solution of a kind:

If you have alternating layouts for left and right pages, you can confirm this on the register saying specifically "only left" or "only right" for each
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tonytheopen
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Re: [Issue] Automatically inserted pages and page numbering

Post by tonytheopen »

Automatically inserted pages:
Having read a few dozen dozen of the comments, and also the defenses from the Open Office development folks, I am moved to add in my 2 cents. After some 15 successful years as an applications programmer (all assembler language, as it happens) I feel strongly about some kinds of design issues and also about some kind of designer postures.

To start with, the designers are ideally able to view thei objectives in terms of the needs of users, not in terms of program elegance or apparent good sense or anything else that does not directly serve the user. For example, a list of errors in a program that serves to report errors for people to check into should make it easy for people to do that. Instead, good programmers will be tempted to provide lists of number codes with each number signifying a particular error. You can see how that appeals to the programmer. But can the programmer (or system designer) see how that fails to appeal to the person training employees to follow up on errors using the report? It's obvious, once looked at in that light, that a short error description is much more desirable.

Now, how does this relate to OpenOffice' Mail Merge? Well, the justifications given for the obfuscations of the tool are for the most part only sensible to the software types who designed it. No hard working guy or gal in an office wants to do a mail merge for 500 or so post cards only to find out they can't be printed because every other card is blank. They can't be worrying about "odd pages" and "even pages". The fault is not in the actual coding; it's in the understanding of what the software really needs to do ... it needs to be easy to use; easy to understand; designed to make choices obvious.

In this instance the problem is particularly egregious because the easy way out, without a lot of rewriting, would be to give the option UP FRONT to omit blank pages. So simple. Instead, not only is this lacking, but there is no not even an option to remove blank pages from a file at a later time. Instead, you must uncheck the box that indicates blank pages will be printed. Grand; and if you print again, 5 minutes later, guess what. The box is checked once again. At least, folks, let's let us set it the way we want it and then be able to forget it.

It's a great program; lots of hard work and dedication embodied in it. There's always room for improvement, and in this instance the improvement needs to be in the attitudes and understanding of the people currently defending these foolishly designed characteristics.

I recall, many years ago, when Ashton Tate owned the world with its Wordstar program ... the first GREAT popularly available word processor. They developed an attitude that belittled the users. They thought they knew everything and the users were lucky to get their thinking. And they went under and into history, not because they couldn't program, but because they couldn't or wouldn't see things from viewpoint of users' needs.

Tony in Rindge, New Hampshire
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Re: [Issue] Automatically inserted pages and page numbering

Post by aqualung »

tonytheopen wrote:To start with, the designers are ideally able to view thei objectives in terms of the needs of users, not in terms of program elegance or apparent good sense or anything else that does not directly serve the user.
Well stated. (Note, by the way, that the issue opened halfway through this thread remains unfixed after more than three years.)

One wonders whether developers and users can ever get on the same page. At Oracle, reportedly more than a hundred senior technical developers were working on OpenOffice.org and its for-sale brother Oracle Open Office. Is that a large team? Mid-sized? Small, given the scale of the tasks? How productive were these people? How can an outsider even begin to assess their performance?

I haven't been with this forum since the beginning, so I don't know if any developer ever visited here and made himself available for questions, discussions and small talk, explaining what it looks like to work in the developer team and letting people blow off some steam while listening for the underlying causes. Granted, many programmers are not the talkative type, and there are the mailing lists, but wasn't there even one gregarious type to stop by the forum and say hello?

Those interactions that I have seen were on bugzilla, where developers for the most part are terse, which is their natural style of communication, but it tends to increase frustration on the part of users who had to navigate a thicket of sign-in screens and FAQs to get there. To be fair, I've also seen some developers take the time to explain something in language ordinary people can understand.

I don't see how this is going to get much better with LibreOffice/The Document Foundation or a future Apache(?) OpenOffice.

Sorry for ranting, but I just gave up halfway through on reading a book, After The Software Wars, from open-source advocate Keith Curtis. I had found it through one of the links in the Oracle gives OOo to community thread. What a poorly written book, heavily biased in favor of open source, haphazardly organized, filled with circular reasoning and an undigested jumble of free-market talk and utopian socialism. It's the same starry-eyed attitude that I see in the proclamations from some of the TDF spokespeople.
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Hagar Delest
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Re: [Issue] Automatically inserted pages and page numbering

Post by Hagar Delest »

No developer ever came here AFAIK (neither on oooforum BTW). Well, perhaps they look at some topics but in this case, they don't engage in any discussion. I understand that posture because else they would be overwhelmed with questions and requests for explanation/justification/...

I fully agree that the devs seem not to really listen for the users. But we are looking at the issues we would like to be fixed on our point of view. Perhaps there are other priorities having a good rationale too.

On the other hand, there are some issues (like the data loss with files made of ####) where devs just say that the report can't be valid because it's not reproducible whereas we can prove that this is a new problem that appeared with 3.x branch that had never been seen before. Even if this is not easily reproducible, we can't ignore those cases and just look in another direction to avoid seeing it...
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JeffreyTBest
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Re: [Issue] Automatically inserted pages and page numbering

Post by JeffreyTBest »

I'd like to comment on this as the original poster. Since posting, I have given up on persuading OO to control page layout and page numbering, as for almost all my needs I can export a linear document as a PDF and use Adobe Reader to put those pages in the sequence I require. (I'd like to use Okular, but it does not print as flexibly as Adobe Reader.) This actually makes more sense as I don't have to designate a layout for the raw document and I can decide on one when printing. As I often have to email some copies and print and post others, producing a fixed PDF version of a document is a useful "version freeze" mechanism, and I can email the PDF, print as duplex A4 for the files and as a centre stapled/bound A5 leaflet for the most paper-efficient posting option. It would be nice to be able to manage numbering and printer page sequencing directly from OpenOffice Writer, and I still think that sorting the page numbers one enters into the print dialogue in ascending order before printing is a daft idea, but it is actually simpler and more maintainable to produce the simplest possible document layout which will retain the most flexibility when considering possible printing problems. Having blank pages in some printed formats and not others is more trouble than it is worth, so I now no longer bother trying.

I mentioned in a previous post that I was considering canceling our trials. In the end, I continued them, but the OO suite is still in trials and with LibreOffice being dumped on OpenSuse users via a supposed "security update" which introduced a whole slew of new problems that the developers deny all knowledge of, I can't see these trials reaching completion any time soon. Given that between 1989 and 2000 Microsoft's Office suite exhibited reliability and functionality issues of similar consequence as OO/LO does now, I still think that the latter is making better progress, albeit there is a long way to go. Now, if only I could work out how to use the sdbcx API facilities with the objects available from ThisComponent or StarDesktop in Base, then I'd feel I was making progress in implementing an adequate support infrastructure for the suite, but that is another issue belonging in another forum.

Any other problems accrued in this thread since my OP remain at the mercy of the developers.
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