[Tutorial] Page styles and headers/footers
Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2011 12:05 pm
Writer uses page styles to control things like page size and orientation, margins, headers and footers for blocks of pages. There's good news and bad news about them. The good news is: page styles are very powerful, and once you master them, they're easier to use than the sections in MS Word (used to be). For one thing, you can use the same page style for different parts of your document, and you can't do that with sections. The bad news is: the way you apply a page style to a block of pages is very counter-intuitive. You'd want to select a block of text and apply a page style to it as you would apply a paragraph style to selected text. That doesn't work. Apply a page style somewhere in the middle of your document, and it will replace the page style for a large number of preceding and following pages. Or you'd want to put the cursor somewhere on a page and apply a page style to it as you'd apply a paragraph style to a paragraph with the cursor in it. If you do that, pages before and after that page will get the same page style, from the previous page style transition to the next. You may see that as a shortcoming in the software, but that's how it is.
You don't have to worry about page styles as long as you want the same page size, headers, footers, etc. on all pages (or left and right pages) of your document. You can simply deal with that with Format - Page. The trouble starts when you want a header on some pages and not on others. That's when you need to use different page styles.
There are two problems here, one is how to switch page styles safely. The other problem is how you change the properties of a page style. Here the user interface is lacking. It'd be much better if there was a toolbar where you can configure the behavior of your headers and footers when the cursor is in a header or footer. But now you can only change them with Format – Page or with the styles list (press F11 to open or hide it), fourth icon from the left.
You can double click a style to change the current page style. You can also change the page style for the page holding the cursor by right clicking the page style name (between page number and language) in the status bar (bottom of the window) and selecting a style from the list. Don't do that in a document that already has different pages styles if you are new to pages styles. If you're an experienced user, you probably don't want to change page styles in a document with several page styles that way either. The safest way to work with page styles is
- first to analyze what you need and create the page styles that you need if you need more than the predefined ones;
- to work from page 1 (numbered or not, it's the first page of the document) and proceed until the last page, applying new page styles where required.
Below we'll
- discuss how to (safely) move from one page style to another,
- mention problems in conversion to and from the MS Word format and
- give some examples of how page styles are applied for documents with different headers.
If all of this seems very abstract, just start a new document, enter enough dummy text to fill a few pages and apply the instructions until you get the hang of it all.
You don't have to worry about page styles as long as you want the same page size, headers, footers, etc. on all pages (or left and right pages) of your document. You can simply deal with that with Format - Page. The trouble starts when you want a header on some pages and not on others. That's when you need to use different page styles.
There are two problems here, one is how to switch page styles safely. The other problem is how you change the properties of a page style. Here the user interface is lacking. It'd be much better if there was a toolbar where you can configure the behavior of your headers and footers when the cursor is in a header or footer. But now you can only change them with Format – Page or with the styles list (press F11 to open or hide it), fourth icon from the left.
You can double click a style to change the current page style. You can also change the page style for the page holding the cursor by right clicking the page style name (between page number and language) in the status bar (bottom of the window) and selecting a style from the list. Don't do that in a document that already has different pages styles if you are new to pages styles. If you're an experienced user, you probably don't want to change page styles in a document with several page styles that way either. The safest way to work with page styles is
- first to analyze what you need and create the page styles that you need if you need more than the predefined ones;
- to work from page 1 (numbered or not, it's the first page of the document) and proceed until the last page, applying new page styles where required.
Below we'll
- discuss how to (safely) move from one page style to another,
- mention problems in conversion to and from the MS Word format and
- give some examples of how page styles are applied for documents with different headers.
If all of this seems very abstract, just start a new document, enter enough dummy text to fill a few pages and apply the instructions until you get the hang of it all.