Placing Header and Footer outside the Page Border in Writer?

[leavin]

I have the question posed here, which was closed without an acceptable answer.

More concretely: I want a page style that has a page border around the main text area… but I want the page number to appear below the border.

Things I’ve tried:

• I hoped to set the Footer spacing to be negative and put the page number in the footer, but negative spacings aren’t allowed.
• Instead of using page border, just draw a Rectangle shape, anchored to Page. This works within a document, but I need it in a subdocument, and master documents throw away anything that’s anchored to page (as opposed to paragraph or character).

I’m on Libreoffice Writer 5.0.3.2

[RGB-es]

As you discovered, Writer considers the heather and footer to be part of the “text area” so in order to apply a border and get something similar to a footer outside that border you need a couple of tricks.

On the page style: set the border, but put the “space between text and border” to zero for the lower border. Now modify the height of the footer to its minimum values.

Put the cursor into the “real” footer (yes, we’ll make a “fake” one), right click → edit paragraph or paragraph style and set the font size to the minimum value accepted by Writer (6pt, I think).

Finally, with the cursor still on the footer, Insert → Frame → give to it the same with as your text area and put inside the frame the info you need before moving it to the desired position.

See this sample file borders.odt

If this workaround is useful for you, please click the green check mark on this post to set your question as solved.

[leavin]

Tricky, but it works! When doing this in master-subdocument combination, all of these steps must be done on the master page style. Also, updating the subdocuments’ data in master will erase the footer’s Frame, so you need to add it last.