Can I lock page breaks?

[Bobsone]

Hi
I want to create a LibreOffice Writer template and I would like to separately lock the first two and the last pages.
If I insert page breaks it all looks good until the text on the page is deleted and then by pressing delete again the page break also gets deleted and the following pages text moves up a page.
Is there a way to have a page break that cannot be deleted while editing the text on the preceding page?

Thanks.

[khanson679]

What is the purpose of this? I don’t think you can simply make a page break un-deletable. If you don’t want the content to change, then perhaps you put the content in sections and make the sections protected.

[Bobsone]

It isn’t that I want to make a page break un-deletable, rather I want to have page breaks that won’t be deleted whenever someone edits a page and deletes one more paragraph mark-space than is on the page. When this is done the page break is deleted and the following pages text starts moving up a page. E.g. a bibliography will stay on its own page(s) and won’t end up moving up a page if someone accidently deletes one paragraph tab to many.

[ajlittoz]

If I understand what you’re doing, it looks like you vertically space your text with paragraph marks. This is wrong. Vertical spacing should be provided with Space above/below attributes in paragraph style. You should never have an empty paragraph in a document. Thus you never risk to delete a “structural” empty paragraph.

[ajlittoz]

Instead of trying to make page breaks undeletable, think about your document structure.

In your example, you cite a bibliography. A bibliography begin with a title and then the entries follow. The bibliography is a separate part in your document with its own presentation, header and footer, perhaps a different page numbering. This leads to design specific paragraph, character and page styles for the bibliography.

One important paragraph style is the one dedicated to the title. This paragraph style will contain THE page break to switch to the bibliography page style.

Now what is the risk? Your user can delete everything before the bibliography title without impact on it: the bibliography always starts on a new page… The bibliography merges with the preceding document part only if user erases bibliography title and its paragraph mark. Erasing the title is obviously something which is visible. It can be cancelled and reverted (Ctrl+Z) or the title can be retyped AND the paragraph restyled to bibliography title.

The same holds for the other document parts: title page(s), TOC, chapters, indexes, … A template primarily contains reusable styles, so learn how to use them if you don’t know yet. Then design those to fit your needs, not neglecting the Next Style property which can provide automatic paragraph style transition thus speeding typing with fewer manual manipulations.

If this answer helped you, please accept it by clicking the check mark to the left and, karma permitting, upvote it. If this resolves your problem, close the question, that will help other people with the same question.

[HenkC.Meerhof]

In addition to ajlittoz. If you need those title and other pages to be empty, you also will delete the paragraph style of your ‘title’. In these case, you can changes the (wrong) title to ‘write here your title’ with the appropriate style, and you will have

1. your reserved title page in your document, also when printing.
2. a reminder for the writer/editor to add the right title
3. the funny result that the title page will state ‘write here your title’ when writer/editor didn’t do so.

[Bobsone]

Hi, thanks for the responses.
I need to experiment some more. I have been using default the styles but didn’t know about (hadn’t considered) the paragraph style and the paragraph space above/below function.

Thanks again for the responses
Bob.