Set Tabs to Right Margin

[lmat]

I’m printing a six-page brochure. Using the “brochure” print settings is not good, so I have each page as an 8.5"x11" and I print by setting “two-sided short edge” and print pages 6,1,2,5 (two pages on one side), then printing 3,4,3,4 (two pages on one side). The final brochure is folded in half with a half-page insert (pages three and four).

The problem is when I try to maximize the use of the page without cutting text off at the edges. I have one page style for each page because the margin settings depend on whether the right or left edge of the page ends up at the edge of the paper or in the middle of the paper (and other aesthetic considerations). Much text on the page is laid out like this:

left-text<TAB>right-text

and the right-text should be right-aligned at the right edge of the page. Since each page has its own style (styles p1, p2, etc.), the tab stops will be different on each page to hit the right margin.

It looks like tab stops are paragraph-level settings, though, not page settings. Does that mean I need the whole set of paragraph styles duplicated for each page they’re on, and “manually” keep those paragraph styles in synchronization with their corresponding page styles? Is there a less error-prone way to accomplish this?

My file: 2021-02-21.odt

[Hrbrgr]

It’s a little hard to follow.

The best thing would be to anonymize your file and upload it here.

To upload, edit your initial question and use the paperclip icon.

As a first tip, use "frames" for the pages.

[lmat]

Great idea! Done! (No need to anonymize: this is a public document.) I’ve never heard of frames, so I’ll get to reading!

[ajlittoz]

I looked at your document. You’ll never achieve a clean layout: it is made exclusively from direct formatting. You never use any paragraph style not character style. Vertical spacing is done with empty paragraphs. This will lead you nowhere.

Learn first styles in the Writer Guide. Of course, it’s a bit late for tomorrow but learning is never spoiling one’s time.

PS: don’t go for frames. Your document is really simple and you should do with a carefully chosen collection of paragraph styles.

[lmat]

Wow, excellent answer! I’m closely familiar with styles as you surely remember from question 203594 (just kidding! I’m sure you don’t remember :-P). The document was originally slammed together by someone else, and it hasn’t been carefully re-designed since then.

[ajlittoz]

A page style only defines some geometric aspects of the page. Within the surface of the sheet, it reserves an area for text flow: the area within the margin. This is the only relationship between a page style and text.

Positioning and aligning text is a matter of paragraph style. The fact that you can’t define a right-margin tab stop is really inconvenient: you must give the distance from the left margin. I.e. if you change margins, you must manually adjust the stop distance. You can however record your right-margin tab stop in all your paragraph styles so that they can be used on left and right pages (unless I didn’t understand the layout: left-aligned on left pages and right-aligned on right pages can’t be achieved with Writer paragraph styles and in addition this would imply a change in alignment inside a paragraph if it straddles a page boundary).

In the experiment I made, I have no problem to brochure-print A5 pages in A4-landscape sheets. However, brochure print works on multiples of 4 pages. Therefore I have 2 blank pages at end.

If you insist on a 6-page brochure, Writer is not the right tool for that. You need a desktop publishing application where the primary object is the page whereas in Writer the paragraph is. Scribus is an example as a FOSS application, Quark XPress is a commercial product.

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