Ersatz Header Field

Creating a camera-ready copy for publication in LibreOffice Writer (v. 6.0.x) has more pitfalls than I would have expected. But the main problem I have encountered seems to have no workaround.

Throughout this document, I have put the book title in the header of verso (i.e., “left-side”) pages; for recto (“right-side”) pages, I have inserted a the field code for the chapter name. This works well throughout the document EXCEPT on one page about a third of the way through document. There – and only there – the header reads “Foreword to the 2019 Edition” (that is, a header which should only appear in the book’s front matter.) I can’t figure out why.

For context:

  • Each chapter is its own section; this is mainly in order to…
  • …be able to collect all the endnotes at the end of each chapter.
  • This particular chapter has 19 endnotes, which stretch from the bottom of verso/page 62 to the top of verso/page 64. Page 63/recto is where the ersatz header field appears.

It would seem that some combination of section and endnotes is triggering this problem.

Am I right in assuming that the “Chapter” field variable comes from a Heading 1? If so, this makes the appearance of the ersatz header even more peculiar. In desperation to make it go away, I turned all of the front-matter Heading-1 style to Heading-2 styles. But even with “Foreword to the 2019 Edition” (back on page vii) demoted from Heading-1 to Heading-2, the problem still persists.

Any help or guidance would be appreciated!

That sounds … strange.

Could you provide a sample document here? E.g., replacing each character in your text with some single character (i.e., replacing .* regex with a), and then making your headings distinguishable again (manually making them “heading 1”, “heading 2”, …) to create a anonimized sample?

Sorry for the delayed reply. I have been traveling on business to Latin America, and lacked both time and consistent internet connections.

I’ve heard of regex but have no experience with it. Is there way to replace characters other than spaces?

yes - use search regex like [^\t ], which matches a single character which is not space or tab.

Okay, I’ll experiment with this tomorrow. Assuming I succeed, do I upload the document here? If not, where or to whom?

Citing myself:

Could you provide a sample document here?

@mikekaganski, Okay, I’ve used your Regex trick and replaced every alpha character with “ñ”. I’ve gone back through the document, creating readable Heading 1’s. Our bugaboo ties in with the Header 1 on page “xi” (absolute p. 11) – “Foreword to the 2019 Edition.” Starting with p. 1 (absolute p. 17), verso (i.e., lefthand) page headers show the Book Title, and recto (i.e., righthand) page headers (except those which start a chapter) display the Field Code for the current chapter name.

Check p.49 (absolute p.65) and p.75 (absolute p.91); you’ll see the chapter Field Code displays “Foreword to the 2019 Edition.” There are only two examples in this file, but in the actual file there are three other examples that were lost due to re-pagination. (It seems that the condition only exists if the endnote section begins on a verso page then carries over onto the corresponding recto page.) See link text

It gives an error when I try downloading - file not found.

Just discovered that. I suppose it’s for security reasons, but I can’t find an easy way to make files available here on the forum. I’ll try a different approach in a moment.

Try link text and see if that works. FWIW (if it makes a further difference on pagination), I used the Linux Libertine font. BTW, thanks for all your patient help with this @mikekaganski .

Filed tdf#123917.

Thanks, @mikekaganski. At least it wasn’t a PEBKAC problem. If I can, I’ll subscribe to the bug report to follow developments.