[Solved] Page styles for a book

[philwynk]

Hi, all,

I'm using Open Office to format my book for upload to a self-publishing platform, and I'm having trouble getting page styles to behave.

What I want is some front matter with no header, followed by a Table of Contents with no header, a blank page, the first page of text with no header, and then the rest of the book, with page numbers at the top outside corners and the title of the book at the top. The page size is 5.5 x 8.5 (which may change), and I need to leave room on the inside border for the gutter. The book is very brief, so I don't have chapter boundaries, just a few appendices at the back.

In order to achieve this, I started out creating four page styles: front matter left, front matter right, text left, and text right. My problem is that I can't get the page styles to assign properly. Before I created the front matter, I assigned left and right page styles to the whole book (starting at the back) and it looked great. Then I created the front matter and the TOC and assigned front matter left and right page styles to those pages. The front matter page styles cascaded through the entire book. I went to the first page of text to assign the right page style, and the right and left page styles invaded the front matter.

The help page I read suggested putting a manual page break after the front matter, which I did. Didn't help. I haven't even gotten to trying out headers, or figuring out how to prevent the header and page number from appearing on the first page of text. I can't think of anything else to try. I'm kind of stuck, and considering buying Scrivener or some such to do the formatting for me.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for all assistance.

Phil W.

The .pdf document supplied below explained a better way to do what I wanted. To be precise, I had no idea what was meant by the page style called "first page." It exists precisely to create front matter. I had no idea. And I had never noticed the check boxes and style pull-down on the page break dialog box, either. So, thank you all for augmenting my education. PW

[DiGro]

Phil,

have a look at this: https://openoffice-uni.org/openoffice-uni-en.pdf

It might help you out

[keme]

Basic mindset (different from, more advanced than but also less intuitive than MS Word ways, which many of us are set in):
The manual page break is not a separate item, but a property of the first paragraph after the break.
A new page style can be attached to that break property.

Try: On that document where you have inserted manual breaks...

• Go to the start of the new page.
• Select menu item Format - Paragraph ...
• Select the Text flow tab
  The Break option will be set.
• Tick With page style and select the new page style you need to use.

For the full story, peruse that pdf linked by DiGro.

[floris v]

One more hint: you normally don't need separate page styles for left and right pages. On the Page tab, you can select Left and Right from the Layout settings. Or Mirrored, in that case you have to set the margins only once. You want the page numbers mirrored and the title centered, so don't tick Same content on left and right pages on the Header tab. The header and footer paragraph styles have predefined center and right aligned tabs, use them. You can probably use one page style for front matter and TOC and one for the rest., unless you want different page numbering for the appendices.