Can be removed a particular page from being counted whitout interrupting page count?

GianpyRock · July 18, 2025, 5:51am

Hello. In a document with 10 pages, the first one is the title and page count starts from the 2nd page.

At the 5th page there’s an intermission, just another big title, and this page shouldn’t increase the page count. Should be skipped from counting and the next page should continue.

Here a rapresentation of the structure I want to achieve:

document
├── title
├── page 1
├── page 2
├── page 3
├── page 4
├── intermission
├── page 5
├── page 6
└── ...

Take in consideration that if a new page is added before the 5th those after the 5th should be updated too with the correct page number.

Version: 25.2.4.3 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 33e196637044ead23f5c3226cde09b47731f7e27
CPU threads: 12; OS: Windows 10 X86_64 (10.0 build 19045); UI render: Skia/Vulkan; VCL: win
Locale: it-IT (it_IT); UI: en-GB
Calc: CL threaded

ajlittoz · July 18, 2025, 7:17am

Reopen your question (edit it, don’t use a comment) to add OS name, exact LO version and save format.

You can’t play with the page count which is the number of pages needed by your document. The page number can be modified within certain limits.

The structure you outlined is “faulty”: pages have no existence per se in Writer. They are a consequence of the size of the text: the are allocated on demand and their count automatically varies according to text size. So, what is between “title” and “intermission”: a chapter or a sequence of chapters? What is the “logical” and “structural” role of the “intermission”? Does it act as a supra-chapter delimiter? In this case, include it in the outline hierarchy by styling it Heading 1 (your chapters becoming Heading 2).

Note also that you can’t interfere with the automatic incrementation of page number. You can reset numbering to any absolute origin but you can’t assign a relative number (such as current page ± number). What you want to achieve is not recommended: a reader will be puzzled by an apparently spurious discontinuity in page numbering.

EDIT:
If your document is intended for “physical” publication, i.e. printing, you can manually insert your “intermission” page as a separately prepared sheet between printed pages 4 and 5. Note that since a sheet of paper has two faces, this inserts two unnumbered pages.

koyotak · July 18, 2025, 7:29am

Interesting task, but unfortunately completely illogical! No computer is intelligent enough to know what you want. It can only count continuously, page by page as 4, 5, 6, ff…
Expressed algebraically “thinking” as a computer: Every current page ‘n’ has the counting sequence of the previous page ‘n-1’+1. Your “intermission” page would have to have a different counting sequence, namely ‘n’=‘n-1’. In your case ‘4’=4 that is the same number of the page bevore! What counting sequence should its subsequent page 5 adopt, since both previous pages have ‘n’=4?

The only solution I know is to manually assign a page number to each page, which isn’t difficult with only 10 pages. Then you can insert strange page numbers to confuse your readers, like 1, 99, –, 33, 0, ∞, which might be useful for a particular topic