Controlling a single page in a multi-page document

[Javalicious]

I am completely new to all office programs - I decided to learn on, and use OOo because I hope to move to Linux from MS in the near future. Unfortunately the language that describes the things that may be what I'm looking for is unknown to me - since I have never used any office programs I don't even have the basic skills and lingo down. I've been managing by intuition, by comparing what I know to be graphic program lingo and hobbling along from there.

What I want to do is stop the program from altering all the pages when I change something in a single page. I am using text and images in a 40 page layout, if I want to re-arrange page orders or move one paragraph or picture to another page - the entire documents gets all buggered up - and it takes forever to straighten out the mess it creates. Is there a way to force the program to keep the individual pages as individuals but still have them in a multi-page document? I'm an old school paste up artist so trying to shuffle my ideas around without the physical parts is turning my wrinkles into canyons!

Please Help!

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I think you will have to unlearn what you learnt from graphics programs. Word-processors have a single text stream that flows around the graphics. You can anchor graphics to the page, or to the paragraph, depending on what you want. You could switch to a DTP page layout program like Scribus — that might suit you better.

If you want to stick with Writer, take a look at the page numbering tutorial and learn how to use page styles. If you don't understand styles, you're going to have a hard time using Writer.

[TerryE]

Generally paragraphs are intended to flow across page boundaries, and any anchored images with them. If you want to force page breaks in divide your document into sections (which may also be page aligned) then you can do this with the insert break and insert section menu commands. But not that if you put too much on a page, writer will always flow the text onto an overflow page. That how a word processor (rather than a DTP package) works.

[Javalicious]

Thank you so much for the replies, I have tried anchoring to pages and paragraphs (and experimented with the other anchoring options as well) but it doesn't really anchor things in the proper sense of the word, it's more like a buoy I also spent last night trying various page breaks but they too aren't very helpful as they just shift positon along with everything else. I hadn't realized that it was inherent to word processing to limit functionality to streaming content only.

I don't remember the name of it but 20 years ago I has this "word processor" which was basically an electric typewriter with a b/w LCD screen and a floppy drive in it instead of a paper feed - on that thing you typed to fill your page parameters and once you reached the end of the page you hit the "page" key to add another. From there you could select which page number to work on and changes within them did not effect those that followed. Of course there was no such thing as using charts or graphics, it was pretty basic really. I can see where it's non-streaming functionality would slow down a lot of word processing processes these days and why they need to be so different now - but I sure could use that old thing (with a picture adding capabilities of course)!

You are right, graphics programs are lousy for the text side of things on a large scale, is the DTP you mention a combination program? I'm sorry if I sound lame but I don't know what DTP stands for As for styles, I was trying to read about them in the OOo help files last night too but I found that without previous experience I didn't understand most of it - am going to try the page numbering tutorial and see if I can get a better grasp of styles.

Again, thanks and Cheers!

[foxcole]

DTP means desktop publisher. Here's a Wikipedia article that might help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_publishing

The article mentions (and, I believe, links to) Scribus, which is open source and therefore popular among OOo forum members.

For possibly an easier-to-handle reference, find the Writer Guide in my sig line below. I prefer the PDF version, but it's also online. That document (along with forums like this) is how I learned to use OOo. However, I come from a long history of Word, MS Works, and other word processors, so I'm not sure what in there might be difficult for a shiny clean pure new user to understand. Your questions, suggestions and opinions would be extremely valuable in that respect.