I am formatting a book in Libra office writer, and was having problems with pictures “jumping” and after getting help it seems that has been “cured”. I am still having problems with the chapter titles moving once in a while to a different page and I need it “locked” onto a specific page and specific place. I have tried “saving” things and it didn’t work, Is there any way to “Lock” the title of the chapter to the TOP of the page and so it will not move at all?
thanks
In Writer, locking an object to a specific page is possible, but it is a bad idea because it will remain in the designated page for ever, no matter how you edit your document. A locked-to-page object is removed from text flow and no longer has any relation with surrounding text.
What you require in fact is how to tell Writer to insert a page break before a chapter title so that the title becomes the first paragraph of a new page.
A chapter title should be styled with paragraph style Heading 1. You then customise the style.
- Display the style side-pane with
F11(except on MacOS X) orFormat>Styles & Formatting - Right-click on Heading 1 name and
Modify - Go to
Text Flowtab - In the Breaks section, tick the Insert box (type
Page, position Before)
Note: never achieve vertical positioning of paragraph with empty paragraphs. Edits will always move these empty paragraphs and ruin your alignment.
EDIT 2019-11-25
The F11 key is equivalent to Format>Styles & Formatting menu selection.
Given the description of your intent (reformatting an old Word document into Writer), you’ll be faced with two issues due to the different conceptions of what a document is in both apps.
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The abstract model in Writer is much more elaborate (and in my opinion better specified and rigorous) with objects controlled by styles. A style is a collection of attributes (dimensions, spacing, font, effects, relation to other objects, etc.) which can be applied to an object. You have paragraph styles, character styles (used to change a sequence appearance inside a paragraph), page styles, frame styles (for images, charts or out-of-textflow text) and “list” styles.
Word only has paragraph styles in its stylesheet and the rest must be done manually.
The style concept is central in Writer. Though all paragraph styles are equal, some of them have special roles and receive special attention. This is case, among others, of the Heading n (n=1 to 10) family used to designate paragraphs as being chapter, sub-chapter, sub-sub-chapter, … titles. Those will be automatically collected to generate an always-in-sync TOC.
Page styles allow to constrain text to be always located on a right (odd) page, e.g. a chapter start. They can also be linked so that this results in an alternation right left right left etc.
In your case, Heading 1 textflow should be changed so that you force a page break
Beforeto page styleRight page. All your chapter will then begin on a right (odd numbered) page with blank page insertion if needed to respect parity.In short, what you need is to configure or customise the existing styles to put your formatting constraints in them instead of doing it manually wherever in the text itself.
Describing styling is too long for an answer here, so read the freely downloadable guide to have an introduction. Before tackling your reformatting, experiment on small dummy documents.
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The second issue is a matter of conversion.
Your original document comes from Word and must be translated into internal Writer form (called ODF). To avoid multiple cumulative translations every time you load and save your work, save it in Writer format (with an .odt extension). You can then keep an untouched original in .doc (but I’m afraid it is too late for this “untouched” original) and the reformatted work copy in .odt.
During the translation process, Writer must convert (imperfectly because .doc specifications are closed source) Word document formatting into its style structure. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, Word only knows of paragraph style. All the rest (temporary bold or italics, font change, etc.) is done manually. Writer packs these temporary changes against the surrounding paragraph style into numerous character styles with fancy names, each one being applied only once even if similar to another one.
The equivalent manual formatting workflow in Writer is called direct formatting. It is the cause of document maintenance nightmare and should be reserved for experimentation. A document intended for log term edition should only be formatted with styles exclusively.
The worst case is with bulleted or numbered lists.
Consequently, you’ll see a real mess in the style list, particularly in the character styles.
Ideally, you should redefine and group character styles and then restyle the document. However, since you are a beginner with Writer, just care only for the most urgent problems because this restyling activity involves a heavy initial load, though it is beneficial afterwards.
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thanks for the replies…
Howdy! Thanks for the reply. I wrote the story in a very old word program, (1997) and was having ALOT of difficulty trying to format it, with pictures and text jumping all over the place, so I down loaded Libra office writer and opened the file with Libra and have been trying to format it there… It is better than the old word program that is for sure, but I am still having problems with the title /chapter pages occasionally jumping onto a previous page or sliding a ways down the page instead of staying where I put it at the top of the “odd” numbered page… When I go back to correct the table of contents page numbers when I am done–If I cannot keep my titles page where I put it-well the table of contents page numbers are going to be off, which is NOT what I want… As this was opened with Libra, it is in effect “copied” into place from Microsoft I admit I am NOT knowledgeable about the different terms like “page break” and I am wondering if I do a “Page break” like it is recommended, will it keep the title /chapter from jumping to the previous page or sliding down the page like it has been doing? Also, my computer does not have the F-11 key like my old one does, so what can I do? Thanks!
Well, this is additional information to your question and should have been put below it with a subtitle such as “EDIT”. You are encouraged to do so using the edit link at the bottom of the question.