how to delete all page content but leave blank pages?

I have a document in writer comprising of 200 hundred pages of images and text. The 200 pages are in portrait and landscape, as well as different sizes. If I press Ctrl+A and then delete the content, everything gets deleted and I am left with a 1 page document. What I want to do is delete all the content, but be left with the 200 blank pages. How do I do this in writer?

If anyone is wondering the purpose of this - I want to keep 200 page blank document , as this reflects the exact page structure of a PDF document I have (document B). The purpose of the blank document is to make a number of annotations, add numbering, colour the pages etc. I then save this as a pdf (document A) from writer and overlay document A over document B using other software.

You can’t do this in a simple way because pages are not primary objects in Writer. Pages are a consequence of text content. They are allocated on demand to host text. Delete text, there is no longer any need for pages.

To keep 200 pages, you must have content for 200 pages worth. At a minimum, you should add manual page breaks.

However, this is silly. Edit your question to explain why you want to keep a 200-page blank document. If your only motivation is to have a void skeleton file where you later add content to make it similar to another document in your collection, you should consider creating a custom template fully configured with styles. Styles may be used to control paragraph formatting but also page properties such as orientation, margins, header and footer. Images live in frames and there are frame styles to control their attributes.

A template may also have initial content repeated on every document created from it (skeleton cover page, copyright notice, skeleton TOC, chapter outline, skelton index, backcover, …). Initial content plus automatic page creation through paragraph style command should do what you expect.

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I want to keep a 200 page blank document , as this reflects the exact page structure of a PDF document I have (document B). The purpose of the blank document is to make a number of annotations, add numbering, colour the pages etc. I then save this as a pdf (document A) from writer and overlay document A over document B using other software.

If the goal is to annotate a PDF document, why don’t you use a PDF viewer? Many have an annotation mode which could match your purpose.

Alternatively, open your PDF with LO. It will show as a Draw document. There are known issues when fonts are not available on your system or when forms are involved, but you should have a try. Draw tools are there to add shapes, colour, text boxes for annotations. Not fully user-friendly but a possibility.

The precedent suggestions do not need a merge of A and B since you do everything on A (which is an exact copy of B).

I don’t see a practical procedure with Writer because it would involve a full retyping and formatting of the original document.

A PDF editor is very restrictive. One example is if I want continuous numbering throughout all pages - it’s very easy to do this in writer. Once done in writer I can simply overlay it onto the other pdf with a simple command line program. If the page layout is exactly the same for the two documents, this works really well. Much quicker to do something like this with writer than mess about in a PDF editor page by page.