[Solved] Change margins on a book

[childeharold]

Hi, thanks for reading.
I've written a poetry book and somewhere along the way, I have accidentally changed the page layout. So there's more margin space on every side than I'd like. Now the problem is, if I change the page format, it changes the spacing. So more lines from the previous page will go over or under. Completely throwing the poetry out of it's order.

Everything is perfect. I don't want to change a thing. But I'd like to broaden the margins, while also simultaneously making the text bigger to fit the bigger space. And I'd like to do this for every page. How do I do this?

I know I could do it manually page by page, but it's over a 100 pages... all the titles are in a specific size, the text varies in size in parts, it's so much work to remake everything by hand.

Is there a shortcut?
Thankyou so much

[RoryOF]

In which file format is your file Saved?

[childeharold]

it's saved in odt

[JeJe]

Are you using page breaks or are you using blank lines to go on to the next page? If you're using page breaks then you can (often) make changes that won't affect the following pages.

[floris v]

If your titles are in a specific font size, you can apply the Heading 1 paragraph style to them, and modify that style to have the same font settings, plus include a page break before, so that each poem will start on its own page, if you want that. After that, you can safely change the margins - the only problem might be that some poems won't fit on one page anymore.

How does that work? Use Find/Replace to find all text with the font size that you use for the titles. Enter ".*" in the Find field, tick Regular expressions, click Format and select the formatting of your titles, then click Find all, close the dialog box, apply Heading 1 to the selection (Ctrl+1). Do this with a copy of your document.

findformat.png (35.7 KiB) Viewed 4968 times

[childeharold]

Unfortunately I'm not using page breaks, I just went to the next page.
In that I want to make changes to ALL the pages in the same way...
In photoshop, I could just scale the text to the new page margins.
Something like that. But i don't know how to scale up my writing to the new margins. I only know how to change the size of the font, but that's not what I'm looking for. I want to make new margins.... and scale everything (almost like you would rasterize the page).
Does the option even exist in open office?

[childeharold]

If your titles are in a specific font size, you can apply the Heading 1 paragraph style to them, and modify that style to have the same font settings, plus include a page break before, so that each poem will start on its own page, if you want that. After that, you can safely change the margins - the only problem might be that some poems won't fit on one page anymore.

How does that work? Use Find/Replace to find all text with the font size that you use for the titles. Enter ".*" in the Find field, tick Regular expressions, click Format and select the formatting of your titles, then click Find all, close the dialog box, apply Heading 1 to the selection (Ctrl+1). Do this with a copy of your document.
findformat.png

Thankyou that's a great idea... but I'm a bit of a novice. I can understand the theory. I'm not sure how I'd go in practice.In that everything must be scaled up, even the text as well as the titles. What you describe is a little complex for me... I guess i can give it a shot though..

[floris v]

You can upload an anonymized version of part of your document so that we can have a shot at it. Make a copy of your document, and in the copy, replace each letter with a random letter, like x. Use the literal string [a-zA-Z] in the Find box and x in the Replace box, turn on regular expressions, replace all. Then upload that copy.

Keep in mind that a word processor is not DTP software, so the things that you mention here aren't available in Writer.

[JeJe]

If you're aiming for printed output then your printer might allow scaling of pages to a percentage of the current size. If not, you can export what you have to pdf format and your pdf viewer (mine anyway on Win10) allows scaling of pages when printing.

[childeharold]

If you're aiming for printed output then your printer might allow scaling of pages to a percentage of the current size. If not, you can export what you have to pdf format and your pdf viewer (mine anyway on Win10) allows scaling of pages when printing.

That's a good idea... I'll try that on Monday. I'll head to the printing place see if it's possible, maybe change the paper size to B5 maybe. Or of maybe i can scale within A5 (thats what i currently have).

Thanks!

[RoryOF]

I have not knowledge of your document, I surmise it is likely that you have used OpenOffice as a typewriter, so everything is direct formatted.

Using a copy of your file, not the original, work out the increase in scale the new margins will require, and apply them to the page style in use (probably Default) if my surmise above is valid. Then increase the font size in the used Paragraph style by that scale factor - again, probably Default paragraph style. That should bring you to almost a satisfactory result, but you may have to do little fine tuning of the page layouts.

If all that doesn't work reasonably, you can revert to your original file and start again using a different method.

[childeharold]

You can upload an anonymized version of part of your document so that we can have a shot at it. Make a copy of your document, and in the copy, replace each letter with a random letter, like x. Use the literal string [a-zA-Z] in the Find box and x in the Replace box, turn on regular expressions, replace all. Then upload that copy.

Keep in mind that a word processor is not DTP software, so the things that you mention here aren't available in Writer.

I'm going to try what user Jeje said and try to scale it on Monday at the print shop. If it's not possible I'll come back and take your kind offer.
Thanks everyone, it's a long multi year project. I'm so close, I just want it to look nice with readable text.

All the best. Thanks again.