How do you re-start page numbering?

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If I understand correctly the case, it is a matter of using a tool in an organisation without having to think over the nature of the tool.

The relevant questions are: what is the "production"? how is it produced (workflow, people, …)?

From my experience, trying to change for a new tool without taking human factors and tool specificities into consideration is doomed to failure. The startegy "new tool, no change in habits" is wrong, if not suicidal.

Your main argument is about people: they would use the tool routinely and must not need to understand the arcanes of it while using it. This calls for a reasonable amount of automation in the process of producing letters, specifications, reports, proposals, … Add to that, you probably have a "graphic chart" as part of corporate communication. In MS Word, it likely translates into various style sheets, one for each type of document unless all are merged into a giant one.

Your people are accustomed to giving styles Date for the first line, then Addressee, then Subject, then Text Body when they come to the core of the letter. The style sheet may have some Heading n paragraph to emphasise structure of content. At the end, you may have Salutation for a formal good-bye and Signee.

With this scheme, your people already know that they have to click somewhere when they make a topic or structure transition. Jumping to a new page is one of these transition, which is cleverly achieved through a style in the sheet. It is even the only way to guarantee that all documents adhere to the rules defined in the chart, so that all look alike.

You can do the same with LO Writer and even better.

LO Writer has no style sheet per se, because styles are integrated into a document. But, it has a very powerful feature: templates. Templates contain not only styles but also text, such as company logo, legal information in the first page footer, pre-typed data like subject:, refers:, attachments:, reply address, … It is easier for the average Joe to delete unneeded paragraph than add a wanted one consisted with the graphic chart.

Your job is to design those templates and a short notice explaining what is not self-explanatory. Make experiments with administrative clerks to get their feed-back.

You may object that templates imply maintenance work. Yes and this an advantage. Put the templates on a server shared by everybody. Then, every update is immediately available and automatically used by all. When the comm guys fancy to change the corporate logo or the "official" font face, how do you presently make sure that everybody switches to the new rules at once and simultaneously without some black sheep using stale stylesheets?

As you see, it not only a matter of comparable or equivalent features, but before all, a matter of work organisation. Maybe the clerks do not need to understand what happens behind the stage, but you, as an IT learned skilled professional, must objectively ... (more)

"I do not want that page break". "The help instructions don't make sense".

Well, let me ignore the bold statements, and try to describe the logic and reasons behind the instructions.

The text processor doesn't work with pages. It works with textual content, and it dynamically creates virtual pages as required to put the content. It uses some rules - what kind of pages to create and where.

What are those rules? The rules are very simple. If a paragraph (or a few of other types of objects - like tables and sections) has a mark that it needs to start on a new page, then stop filling the previous page (if there is one), and start the new one. If the paragraph specifically describes which properties to use for that new page, then use those properties. Otherwise, use the page settings that the previous page tells to use. If a paragraph doesn't tell that it wants to start a new page, then simply continue filling the current page, until there's free space left; after the free space is filled, then create a new page based on settings of the just-finished page, and put the rest of content there.

The author defines the rules for pages using page styles, which the author assigns to paragraphs or paragraph styles. The very first paragraph in a document has an implicit link to the default page style, unless the author links some style to it explicitly.

If you create some "parts" of the document, like the first part being the "Title" and "Table of Contents", which has own numbers, and then goes the text with its own numbering, then how should the program tell the "actual document content" from the title and ToC? How could the program know when to start new rules of numbering? It's the actual property of the text, that "this text is the first paragraph of the actual content", and no more part of ToC. And the way to tell this to the program is to set the page break with a new page style to the first paragraph of the "actual document content".

If you were doing that by hand, you would take some sheets of paper, and start numbering from 1, and put the actual content there. After you had finished that, you'd take some more sheets, and put the title, and ToC (with resulting normal numbers) there, with special numbering for these auxiliary pages. Do you see the different type of pages used in the process? The program also needs to use different processing for these different types of pages, and that is done by providing dedicated page styles, and an explicit mark (page break) dividing these different parts.

You might confuse the text processor (which focuses on text, and which only uses pages as means to layout the text) with desktop publishing software (like PageMaker, which is built around the PostScript page description language) that has its main purpose to define ... (more)