endnotes can't have page numbers mirrored

Hi,

First off, ever since I ditched MSOffice and started using LibreOffice, I’ve had nothing but head aches, frustrations and ridiculous solutions to things that used to be easy. Had to get that out, I’m beyond frustrated…

The issue I’m trying to solve for the past 48hrs is with the page numbering of the endnotes.

I have my manuscript formatted for printing with pages mirrored so that left and right have their margins alternated, needed for binding. I have endnotes at the end of the last chapter. First page and chapters are correctly setup for numbering, where I use ‘left’ and ‘right’ styles for mirroring the position of the page number so that it always sits on the outside of the page.

Now the endnotes are set in ‘Footnotes and Endnotes’ where you set the style used for the endnotes.
This effectively ‘locks’ the style for the endnotes so you CANNOT use alternating page styles to have the page
numbers mirrored. This is ridiculous, cause it means I simply cannot have the page numbers the way the rest is numbered.

If anyone can tell me if there’s even a solution for this, though I can’t find anything about this.
I’m just wondering how everyone then manages to have the page numbers mirrored in the first place.
Only option left is to center them, but that’s not always ideal to say the least.

This thing may ‘work’ in general and do some things office can, but it feels and acts clunky, amateur-ish, and the information available is awfully confusing. I’m basically stuck until I find a solution for this, or either just move back to something that works.

Two points:

a) I found MS word very frustrating to learn after using Ventura Publisher. I think learning anything new is some work.

b) You’re perfectly welcome to go back to ms-word. No one is forcing anyone to use LO. And open source and free are not for everyone.

Those being said, I don’t think griping helps anyone, least not you. Asking is ok. Working at is it is good. Reading the fine manual is good. Just my 2c, as I have been frustrated myself at times by all software.

I don’t know what it is with this site, second time I find the solution right after posting asking here…

I needed to deselect the checkbox for same content left/right for the footer of the endnotes style.

I really hate how lo works. Too convoluted to achieve simple things, like jingling around perpetually with left and right styles, and clunky behavior, like when choosing a style then ‘modify’ to modify the font doesn’t always work, sometimes it only works the other way around by selecting the text and altering the font, then the style is updated automatically. I tested that multiple times, it’s like it’ll work one way until it decides to work another way. Can’t really rely on that. Same thing with gimp, it’s on equal ground.

The problem with new apps is to forget what became habits with former app. Principles are different and you need time to get used to them. You can’t say “too convoluted to achieve simple things” because you refer to procedures which are now second nature for you.

As for altering visual attributes (font, weight, etc.), that’s not because M$ Word does it wrong you can blame LO Writer for not doing it the same. LO Writer includes a somewhat “compatible” mode called direct formatting but it causes weird behaviour when you mix it with styles (such as style modifications not being reflected in document).

When switching to another tool, you can’t spare learning tool properties anew. Failing doing that, be prepared for frustration. Tools like Writer are very sophisticated, consequently mastering time is quite long.

It feels and acts clunky, office doesn’t. There are no 2 ways about it. Trying to justify said clunky behavior is pretty lame. Imho…

Both apps don’t address the same audience. I’d say LO is rather on the power user side, meaning it may be less intuitive but offering more possibilities, partially bridging the gap between document processing and DTP. Unfortunalely, you have the same difference between a closed app and programming. Here, programming is designing own styles and templates. Once done, you have full separation between appearance and content. Authors can then concentrate on argument, not on the way it should be laid out (though there are interactions between discourse and presentation).

But, sorry if I seem stubborn, you must understand the basic principles, read the manual and accept tha app may be different from the previous one.

You will find documentation at English documentation | LibreOffice Documentation - Your documentation for LibreOffice. I would advise you to skim the Writer Guide which answers some of the questions you have not yet asked. It is important to save the documents using the native .odt for writer documents. especially if you are using page numbers. LibO follows normal printing practice with the page numbering in the page headers or footers and left and right pages. This information can be compromised, just like styles if you do not use .odt.

Thanks, I think I already downloaded that guide yesterday though. I always use odt, I’ve long noticed that using doc doesn’t work well in LO. In any case I found the problem, but it is as you say, definitely ‘not’ intuitive. Also it crashes a lot, though it always ‘recovers’ afterwards, thank God. Just saying, with all the praise flying around for LO, it does have some serious issues, likely because of the way it is coded. Gimp is very similar, very ‘powerful’ indeed, but clunky, crashes constantly, cannot efficiently deal with large ram, and at times has a will of its own. Power is useless without efficiency. It’s like driving a 700hp car with no torque.

I’ve tried to set up the same document in word, which took about two weeks in LO, and it still has issues…
The one in word is 100% setup in less than 4 hours…so there’s a comparison that says a lot. LO may be ‘powerful’ and for ‘power users’, though word does exactly the same things but doesn’t waste your time.

What’s your OS? Stability may be an issue in the OS. With my Fedora Linux, I haven’t had a crash for months, which becomes problematic because I’m no longer used to restarting my machine (it host several servers and is on H24) and debugging it.

Same for Gimp: no crash, even with several hundred Mpixels images. Of course, it relies on swapping and it globally slows down, but work gets done. You should perhaps monitor your machine and reconfgure it in a balanced way: swap disk on the fastest I/O bus, swap space in accordance with biggest expected app+data, not too many daemonized background tasks (or at least those most resource-hungry).

Gimp in deed slows down and keeps working, until it suddenly hangs on any random task. All work not saved is each time lost. LO doesn’t really hang or crash, but when closing often it will show the message something went wrong, and when I reopen the document it is thankfully restored with nothing lost (I usually had saved before closing).

I appreciate the advice, I really do, but I am mainly a music producer, this machine was originally built as a music production workstation, so there really is nothing wrong with it. It is used to operate at full capacity, handling real time processing with a ton of ram and aggressive single-core clocks, although it has 8 cores and 16 threads. It never crashes in my DAW, which requires a ‘ton’ more processing power than any gimp or LO…and this machine is fully configured according to the specs required to handle DAW operations for prolonged times, often 24hour sessions non-stop. It is as lean and mean as a pc can be, there are no bottlenecks.

Just about ‘all’ background tasks are disabled, the pc is kept clean and efficient through better means than the default task scheduler. Most services are disabled or either on ‘manual’, I do not use ‘apps’, that functionality is removed, there is no bloat, etc… even the ‘keyloggers’ from microsoft (a bunch of hidden server-attachments to the OS) are blocked or removed,…Core parking is disabled to prevent processing lag.I can keep going cause there is more…the point is that there is nothing to be done to further improve the efficiency or stability of this machine. If it don’t crash during a music session with all cores constantly at full DSP, then if it crashes say in gimp or LO while using only a few percent on one core, it is definitely a software based issue, and as said, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this machine. Granted, perhaps LO and gimp don’t work too well with Windows, but that isn’t to be blamed on the OS :slight_smile:

What operating system are you using? What language settings? Which version of LibO? Are you using pure styles or are you also using manual settings? I do not have the same reliability problems with LibO. Using the sidebar, customised template, I have all the styles simply displayed in the sidebar.