Considering that there is presently no way to make page styles inherit from a common ancestor, think over your “slight variations”. Having too many different page styles is frequently a sign of bad book preparation.
The main reason to have different page styles is to allow to have different headers/footers. Usually what is written in the header as a chapter title is the only variation.
This can elegantly be resolved with a single page style and field insertion(s) to retrieve more global data like book title, author or chapter heading.
From your additional information, you need a set of page styles for your chapters (the same set: first, left, right for all the chapters) plus a few others for the front matter.
The chapter set is a recurrent question on this site. There are two methods.
##The poor man’s surrogate
This is the simplest one but does not offer full flexibility. It covers however most of the needs. I assume that your chapters will use Default Style.
- Go to the
Header tab
- Enable the header by checking Header on
- Uncheck both Same content left/right and Same content first page
If needed, do the same for the footer.
You now have three contextual page styles with name Default Style: one for the first page, one for left and one for right. The headers are independent from each other.
##The full control method
I shall use First Page, Left page and Right Page. Enable the headers where appropriate (usually, there is no header on First Page).
In the Organizer tab, set the Next style drop-down menu as follows (note that this can be done only after your eventual custom styles have been recorded with OK; here built-in styles already exist):
-
Left Page in First Page
-
Right Page in Left Page
-
Left Page in Right Page
To guarantee proper operation, in Page tab, set Page layout (in Layout Settings section) to Only right for First Page and Right Page and to Only left for Left Page.
If chapters are allowed to start on any page (odd or even), this will not work properly. See my answer here on how to cope with this relaxed requirement.
##Header information
Click in the header of the page where you want the chapter title. Insert>Field>More Fields, Document tab. Select Type Chapter, Format Chapter name (or Chapter number and name). Leave Level to 1 unless you’d like to show sub-chapter.
With fields, header content is not constant but dynamic: the field is replaced by the value of the selected variable. Thus the same page style can be used for several chapters.
This relies on usage of paragraph style Heading 1 for chapter title.
You can also insert other information, like page number in the header through other fields.
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