Hi All,
Writer 6.1.3.2
I have a document that is in portrait format. I want to insert a single landscape page in the middle of the document. I do not what the orientation of the other pages to change. How do I do this?
Many thanks,
-T
You must first understand that pages are not primary objects in LO Writer. Pages are dynamically allocated when the printable space between margins is exhausted. The layout is defined in a page style which you can customise at will.
Unless you create a break in your text flow, page style for the new page stays the same as the current one.
Consequently, when you inserted a page break in your document for your landscape data, you changed for a new “current” style with this orientation. To revert to portrait orientation, you must insert another break where portrait is resumed.
LO Writer (like all digital applications) is dumb and cannot guess where a personally meaningful attribute takes effect and where it stops. You must tell it.
LO Writer is a very sophisticated tool and, as such, you must learn how to use it (intuition is not enough) and also understand the underlying principles to make the highest profit out of it.
Lo Writer being sophisticated is not an excuse for being difficult to use. Word Pro is also sophisticated and setting page orentation is 100 times easier than Writer.
Thank you for the help. Will will set a double page break and see if that works.
This is covered in the Writer Guide (PDF, 15MB)
See: Changing page orientation within a document on page 139.
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/images/c/c0/WG60-WriterGuideLO.pdf#page=139
Basically the page orientation is part of the page style.
So you set-up a landscape page style (or use the existing one) and apply that style to the page.
This is all covered in the guide in more detail.
If this answered your question please check the checkmark at left.
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Page 140 has it.
Wow, what a difficult way to do this. You should just be able to click on the page properties and change it. (Word Pro has me spoiled in this respect.)
Thank you!
I take that back. Not an answer. The manual says it will only change that page, but it changes that page and every page below it. Same issue I wrote about. AAAHHHH !!! </editorial comment>
You seem to have completely missed 3) and 4) at the top of page 141. It’s hard to do something properly if you only read a part of instruction.
I wasn’t able to do anything following these instructions either. Either they are badly written or we are both very stupid.
awesome reference. Worked for me. Thank you!!
Insert > More Breaks > Manual Break
Choose Type: Page break
Style: Landscape
Then do the same again, but choose Style: Default
2 Likes
This should be the accepted answer for OP’s question. I can’t upvote yet unfortunately.
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This is the useful answer in this thread. This method works as described by Allegra above.
Trying to follow the other answers caused weird behavior in the document (e.g. made the odd pages portrait and even pages landscape).
Then you probably are using the alternating set of page styles Right Page and Left Page. Playing with Format>Page Style modifies the current page style (where the cursor is located) and the modification is active on all pages formatted with this page style.
This is not “weird” behaviour but standard intended one. Read the Writer Guide for an explanation about page styles, keeping in mind that Format>Page Style results in a customization of the current page style, not in a one-shot local formatting action.
It’s up to the OP to decide what his or her accepted answer is.
When I followed those instructions to the letter, it gave me a blank landscape page. If you want existing text to be formatted as landscape, move the cursor to the end of the landscape page and insert the manual break there.
wrt user interface design “weird” = behavior not anticipated by users without specific knowledge of the interface.
The fundamental idea of GUIs is to volunteer information to the user, so that they can easily discover how to use the program, without first studying the manual. Blaming users for not being able to understand the interface is the antithesis of GUI design.
I have been a routine user of LibreOffice for as long as it has existed. This used to be an exemplary implementation of a WYSIWG word processor. This is the principle use case for most of the users. It seems that goal has been demoted in the development priorities. That is something which really matters.
It depends on the balance between GUI and feature complexity. From the very beginning, Writer is style-oriented.
Style definition can be fully completed in GUI. This is where you discover the name of the features (but from personal experience it is sometimes very difficult to guess the effect of such and such sub-feature).
BUT, formatting is not GUI-driven. If you try to GUI-format (or equivalently to direct-format), you’ll quickly bump into limitations or conflicts like the one you described.
Sorry to insist upon it, GUI-formatting is an easy way to get a taste about what can be done with Writer but to gain full control on its possibilities, there is no other way than to read some documentation, at least to grasp the founding principles. Writer is WYSIWIG, but get back to the acronym meaning: what you see on screen is what you’ll get on paper, full stop. WYSIWIG never meant it was easy to create the formatting in order to implement your goal.
With Writer, you can design very very complex documents. And this can’t be achieved simply with direct-formatting. You must proceed with styles. And, yes, styling can be done with GUI controls. In other words, you change your GUI control from elementary direct formatting to a more elaborate scheme.
What percentage of LO Writer users choose it for the ability to create “very very complex documents”?
There is a repeated folly in both open and closed source word processors of breaking a popular working system, because the developers are bored. The priority of >95% of users of LO Writer is ease of use.
Word processing is not publishing. When I write books and other very complex documents I use Latex, where I can have explicit control and arbitrarily complex packages. If I used closed source I would use Adobe.
If you can design a system to serve a wide segment of users extending into publishing, all credit to you, but please remember that the overwhelming number of users are writing documents of one to a few dozen pages most of the time.
Have you experienced the styles system? For everyday docs (letters, notes, …), writing such simple documents is a treat with styles. It is even faster than direct-formatting.
I am no developer. I’ve chosen LO Writer precisely for its ease of use. The templates provide another layer of ease of use: pre-formatted documents customised for your own usage. This requires some preparation ahead of it, but the “return over investment” is worth it.
Regarding the trade-off between direct formatting vs. styling, I consider the cut-off point to be at 2 pages for one-shot documents and 1 page (yes!) for maintained documents, i.e. documents you’d edit and revise several times.
And like most users, most of my documents are ~5 pages long.
Sorry, but that’s absolute nonsense. A GUI is a graphical user interface, as opposed to a textual user interface, like in MS DOS. It offers a kind of sorted listing of all commands (that’s what they were called at first) that the software has to offer. In simple programs, that overview will look intuitive, but programs with really many functions will get a clotted UI, and the user will have to learn to work with it.
At first I was as stumped by how to insert a “manual break” as you are about inserting a single landscape page, then when I found that thing in the Insert menu, and noted that you have to select a page style in the window that you get when you invoke that command, it was easy. I much prefer the page style concept to the sections in older versions of MS Word (Word 2003 was the last I owned).