How do I remove a header? (using page styles or otherwise)

[kuboa]

Hello,

I have been messing with headers for some hours and I finally admit that I have no clue what I’m doing.

Basically, I am trying to format a book, and everything is finished except there is one header I would like to remove because it’s at the start of the chapter and stylistically it shouldn’t be there. It appears there are a set of page styles, one for each chapter, except for two chapters which share the same style. I didn’t create these styles and I assume they were auto-generated when they were imported from a Word doc in which I used section breaks and headings.

Where there are two chapters which share a style, I cannot remove the second chapter’s header since only the first header in a set of pages of a given style is allowed to be unique (as far as I know).

So, I would like some way to give the chapter its own style or by any other means remove the header from the one particular page. I am really a newb with this so a detailed solution would be appreciated.

By the way, when I have attempted to create a new style and apply it to the page in question, the style is then applied to the full two chapters which puts me in the same predicament.

[kuboa]

I was able to resolve this by:

1. Creating a new page style modeled after the others

2. Deleting the section break between the two chapters and then recreating the section break using
   Insert > More Breaks > Manual Breaks > (select your new style)

[keme]

Creating a new page style for each chapter defeats the purpose of page styles, unless you need to control the page design layout of each chapter by itself, independently of all other chapters’ page design.

Commonly you would use a Chapterstart page style for the first page of a chapter, and set the Next style of that style to point to the page style you use for other pages.

You can even set the Heading 1 paragraph style to force a page break and start with the Chapterstart page style.

With this, you are down to managing two page styles for your book, instead of 20-30 or whatever count of chapters you have.

The style-per-chapter misconception is frequently triggered by Microsoft Word context. Word has no concept of page style, while Writer only allows page formatting by style. With every transition between Word and Writer context the page formatting must be translated. This translation often creates a lot of page styles and sections.

[ajlittoz]

WARNING! A section in Writer is not the same thing as in Word. A section is a fragment of a document where you can temporarily change the number of columns and a few other attributes imposed by the page style. A section keeps the header and footer defined in the page style. Consider sections as being “sub-pages”.

What you did was to insert a manual page break switching to another page style.

Note that .doc(x) formats have severe limitations regarding page formatting because they have no notion of styles beyond paragraph style. Usually, editing a document with Word or saving it as .doc(x) messes up formatting structure, notably destroying page styles and replacing them with single-page substitutes.