Hello,
I’m new to Libre Office. I have a MS Word document prepared in my office laptop 3 pages long. There is a page break between the pages. When I open the same doc in Libre Office the last few lines of Page 1 spill on to Page 2 and then the page break pushes the rest of document to page 3 and so on. This makes it a 5 pg long document with lot of blank spaces in pg 2 and pg 4. Could someone suggest what needs to be done
Thanks
Venkat
Thanks, I wanted to know if someone has faced this and if there is a fix
Hi Venkat,
Yup, there are some small things that happen to a document when you switch between word and Libre.
The easiest things you can do in Libre Office to try to maintain the same page count are as follow:
It’ll take a while to get used to switching between the two programs. You will find Libre Office way more logical in where to find things in the menu systems.
Thanks HerComs
The cause of this discrepancy lies in the difference of definition of what constitutes the printable area.
In Writer, page margins define an absolutely no-print zone. This means header and footer areas are subtracted from the space betwen the margins.
In Word, page margins define the area where main text will flown and laid out. Header and footer are located outside this “composition” zone and are positioned inside the margins.
Though the doc(x) import filter does its best to “translate” the definitions, there are cases where it fails. Consequently, the usable height in the page is smaller in Writer than in Word. If your page content is quite “tight”, the last few lines may spill over to next page.
Now the question is: is your manual page break really semantically meaningful? Is your unit of formatting the page or paragraphs? A page break only to create “vertical spacing” should be replaced by some parameter in a paragraph style, so that the style automatically decides whether a certain amount of vertical space should be use (mid-page occurrence) or a page break (bottom of page occurrence). If you design a page-based document, a better tool is a DTP application like Scribus otr Quark XPress®.
Meanwhile, the workaround is to adjust top and/or bottom margin in the page style. BEWARE, however, if you work collaboratively in a mixed LO-M$ team. It could be much better to defer margin adjustment until the final proof-reading to avoid transient conversion issues.
And, as usual, decide which application is the master reference: Word or Writer, to store the document in the appropriate format (.doc(x) or .odt).
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Thanks ajlittoz