- Partial answer for item 2.
LO Writer is not a DTP (desktop publishing) application like Scribus or Quark XPress®; In Writer, basic material is text organised in paragraphs. This material is flown on a sequential quantized output medium, aka. pages. Pages are allocated as needed to accommodate text. They have no existence by themselves and are really the last step in document output. Page content depends on text flow and is rather unpredictable.
The only way to restrict page content is to insert manual page break. But even there, you can’t assert if content between two manual breaks will need one or more pages. Consequently, you can’t reorganise your document as you would do it with DTP applications.
The closest equivalent method operates on logical groups of paragraphs (since paragraphs are primary material for Writer) provided you have structured your text with Heading n paragraphs. Then, using the Navigator (F5 or equivalently the right sidepane), you move up or down a whole “section” under a Heading n or also promote or demote it to another level.
But, beware! if you added manual page breaks to synchronise some paragraph with page top, the manual page breraks may not follow the movement. This is why a page break should always be specified in a paragraph style to make structuring consistent and immune to text reorganisation.
- Partial answer for topic 3.
I don’t know what you call quotation formatting. The appearance of it is a personal choice. However, a quotation is usually a paragraph with a dedicated appearance. Then use built-in paragraph style Quotation. If you don’t like the built-in formatting, just customise it. Your changes will be automatically applied to all instances.
- Partial answer to topic 4.
In any serious, elaborated work, never use direct formatting and its avatars (toolbar buttons, keyboard shortcuts or menu items). Prefer a specific character style. Give the character style a meaningful name. Remember that visual variants are rather limited in number and “bold” may mean “important” somewhere and “quotation” elsewhere. Thus, having 2 character styles allows to change the attribute independently from the other (e.g. changing bold to red for important and italics for quotation without having to track the occurrences and remembering which category was intended).
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