Is there a way to navigator from one header or footer to the next header or footer?

English
#1

Each page in my document has a unique footer. I need to each each footer, and it would speed things up greatly if I could the Navigator or a shortcut key to do this.

The Navigator does not seem to allow this, as the Navigate By drop-down does not list Footers. The Navigator does have a Footer button, but this just goes to the current footer and does not go from footer to footer.

There is no preset key to navigate by footers, nor could I find a way in Customize to set one.

I will also have to edit the headers, so the same issue applies to headers as well as footers.

To be clear, I am talking about footers (not footnotes) and headers (not headings).

#2

Did you import a Word document (DOC; DOCX)?
Any problems to share a sample file?
LO-Version and OS?

#3

The document was originally in Word. The problem is not that the footers are unique to each page, however, if that is what you are wondering

#4

Seems to be a fact (→ write a feature request).
.
If (!) the footers had got a unique paragraph style (like in native Writer documents) you could move from one to the other by SEARCH&REPLACE (find previous - find next). In this case it is not necessary to close the SEARCH&REPLACE dialog for editing different footers (or headers).

#5

Thanks, but they use the same paragraph style, just the text varies from footer to footer. If you are sure this navigation functionality does not exist, I will create a feature request.

Just in case, I’ll wait a couple of days to see if someone else comments on this.

#6

Could you attach a reduced version of your document? What you describe hints at a weird document structure. Converting from Word has a tendency to create one page style per page, which effectively destroys any structure.

#7

Wherein lies the uniqueness? Some may argue that having page numbers in the footer makes every footer unique. Detail, please!

The page footer, design as well as content, is defined as part of the page style. This means that to enter specific unique text in each footer, you would need to create a separate page style for each page. However, if the footer content can somehow be extracted from other content or structure, it may achieve your desired uniqueness.
Content which may be extracted in this manner includes outline (headings, chapter numbers), page count, bookmarked content and “variables”.
If the footer content is not something you could extract from page content, I guess you need to simulate the footer, e.g. by using frames and/or tables to force positioning of content. Managing those elements across a large number of pages can be a tedious task.

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#8

Yes, each page has its own page style, and the footer contains a keyword summary of the content of each page. Seemed like a good idea at the time…

In reviewing your comments and check Writer’s functionality, I now see the LO design may have missed this use case (or decided it would occur so little that it was not worth building in header/footer navigation).

I know some users set a different page style for each chapter, so that they can have custom headers/footers for each chapter, so perhaps having header/footer navigation might still be worth having.

#9

In other words, your document is page-based, not flow-based. Writer does not target at all this kind of document. This is rather a job for Scribus (FOSS) or Quark XPress (commercial).

#10

You may use variables for this task, and put the set-variable fields with keywords for the current page into the text body in a non-printed frame. This way, you don’t need the different page styles; and there is already existing “next field” functionality in field edit dialog.

#11

I supposed this flow-based over page-based comment is meant to be helpful, but it sounds like a “blame the user” response to something that Writer directly supports. The LO Writer documentation itself supports making custom page-based designs:

“LibreOffice offers a wide variety of options to design documents. Use the Styles window to create, assign and modify styles for paragraphs, individual characters, frames and pages. In addition, the Navigator helps you to quickly move around inside your documents, lets you look at your document in an outline view, and keeps track of the objects that you have inserted into your document.” (From LibreOffice Writer Features)

Also:

“LibreOffice uses page styles to specify the layout of a page, including the page orientation, background, margins, headers, footers, and text columns. To change the layout of an individual page in a document, you must create and apply a custom page style to the page.” (From Creating and Applying Page Styles)

I created styles for pages that had their own footers and found the Navigator did not allow me to quickly move around inside the document in regard to footers. I am finally told that I should be using flow-based design, even searches show that “flow-based”, “flow based”, or the like is not in the documentation.

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#13

Your citations from the documentation emphasize a serious shortcoming: the document doesn’t describe the underlying principle and this is a shame. Writer is flow-based (and this is not told explicitly). However, this is not incompatible with page styles (on the contrary!).

Pages are allocated on demand to host your text. New pages are styled like the preceding one and share the same layout as defined in the page style.

When you want to change the “geometry” of pages, you must create a “boundary” to stop the automatic page style inheritance. This boundary is the result of Insert>More Breaks>Manual Break where you can choose which page style to apply after the break. This manual process makes it very unfriendly to compose a page-oriented document because you must explicitly delimit your page contents.

An even so, you can accidentally add new pages if some contents edit overflows the current page. This is a consequence of the flow-oriented nature of Writer. In a page-oriented program, increasing page contents does not insert new pages; instead, contents is clipped to the “block” size and you generally get a red marker to warn you about truncation.

The Navigator will help you to quickly navigate inside your document only if it is structured adequately, i.e. some paragraphs are styled Heading n (to be complete, this is not the only means but this is the simplest one) so that they are listed under the Headings section (outline).

#12

Neither Navigator nor key shortcuts allow a document to be navigated by footer or header.

#14

Especially valid for some converted documents (Word) which contain lots of page styles and their indipendent headers/footers.

#15

Add the following simple macro to the application library and assign it to any key convenient for you.
In most cases it should navigate to the footer of the next page.

' Go to next Footer of Text document.
Sub GotoNextFooter()
  Dim oDisp As Object, oFrame As Object
  oDisp=createUnoService("com.sun.star.frame.DispatchHelper")
  oFrame=ThisComponent.CurrentController.frame
  oDisp.executeDispatch(oFrame, ".uno:GoToEndOfNextPage", "", 0, Array())    
  oDisp.executeDispatch(oFrame, ".uno:JumpToFooter", "", 0, Array())    
End Sub
#16

I’m not a power user of Writer (nor of Word), and I didn’t step in here so far therefore.
…
Now I would like to empahsize that the “slot machine” of .uno: commands can produce some results which may not be supported the ordinary API way for not too bad reasons.
…
The above code does not and cannot lead to the selection of the footer of a specific page simply because such an object doesn’t exist. As already mentioned by others, footers are assigned to PageStyle objects. (They have therefore a different text object as compared to the flowing text around.)
…
If the footer (e.g.) gets edited in the state reached by the above code, the changes will be shown on every page for which this style is used wheather it was created by an explicit break or by the automatisms of the text flow.

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#17

Thanks for the suggestion and comment, but I do not plan to add or run LO macros for a variety of reasons, including the necessity of installing a JRE on my computer.

Since headers and footers are assigned to PageStyle objects, perhaps a better interface would be to add fields for contents of the header and footer in the Header and Footer tabs of the Page Style dialog itself. Their contents would still display in the document but clicking on them would call up the dialog. (Yes, different first page and different left/right would need to be supported, but this is all handled via fields.) This way, you could much more easily navigate and edit footers and headers by going to Page Styles in the Navigator and going through the page styles there.

I have examined a number of books in my collection, and quite many non-fiction books have different headers (usually) or footers (rarely) for each chapter. It is also quite conceivable that content creators would want to revise their headers or footers as they edit their chapters. This suggests that it would be a good idea for LO to make it easy, not difficult to do this.

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#18

Mmmh … Header and footer areas are full sub-documents by themselves. Your comment suggests their contents is quite simple, a bit like mere strings optionally with field references.

They can be much more complex:

  • several paragraphs, each styled differently if needed
  • character styles used to highlight or decorate words
  • tables
    I use this to create a cartouche in my technical documents with mention of revision, chapter name, etc.
  • frames, among which images
    The frames get positioned not only within the header/footer area but also in the main text area. This is a way of creating a watermark. Correct positioning is easier when the whole page is displayed, though you can do it blindly by configuring a frame style.

For these reasons, I don’t think that adding an editor device in frame style configuration would really help.


Generally speaking, page styles are associated with “remarkable structures” in a document, such as a heading (for a chapter). Double-clicking on a heading in the Navigator warps you to the first page of the chapter. You can then modify the first header/footer and going to the next page you access the left/right variants.

This may look an indirect workaround to your request, but it already works. As always, good abstraction and structuring of your document is the key to taming its formatting.

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#19

Most macros (including the one suggested above) do not require the use of the JRE.

#20

And yet this pops up:
image

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