Chapter numbering and Headings are interacting in a weird way

English
#1

I’ve used Tools>Chapter Numbering to automatically insert the chapter number at the beginning of each chapter when I double click on Heading 1 in the Paragraph styles. It is working fine, except oddly the alignment on the page for “Chapter Three” is different from all the other chapters; it is slightly over to the left, as if there are some phantom extra spaces being including in the heading after the word “three”, pushing the text further other than would be expected.

Proceedings (for MOE).docx (31.5 KB)

I double checked the way I’d typed the Chapter Numbering, and I can confirm that I typed "Chapter " (including the space) in the “before” box, and " " (just a single space) in the “after” box, as instructed by the LibreOffice help. I’m not sure why it seems only to be Chapter Three that does not appear centred on the page like the other chapters.

Does anyone have some suggestions please? Many thanks.

#2

I didn’t see what caused the Chapter 3 title to be more to the left. But I do have some suggestions for you for using Chapter Numbering.

  • Don’t save in MS Word format when you use complex formatting like this. It’s just complex enough that some of it might not come across right in conversion.
  • Don’t use a tab as separator for the numbering when the chapter title comes on a new line. You can either select Nothing or New Line. You can also use a dedicated character style for the numbering, and then you don’t need to paragraphs and styles for chapter number and chapter title. Make a character style called “Chapter Number”, set the fonts effects to Small Caps, adjust other things as needed and use it in the Character style field. Use the inbuilt paragraph style Heading 1 for the chapter titles + numbering and life becomes a lot easier.
  • In the chapter heading style, have it automatically insert a page break before.
#3

First of all, your document is stored as .docx which means it undergoes translation from/to internal format to alien format when you save and open the file. This has the effect to damage cumulatively the document structure because there is no one-to-one correspondence between format features. List and chapter numbering is one of the known problematic issues.

Second, your document is a real mess with a bad mixture of (rare) styling and (a tremendous use of) direct formatting.

You have played with Tools>Chapter Numbering settings without understanding all the implications: you replaced Heading 1 usage with custom h1 paragraph style So, you definitely don’t double-click on Heading 1 but on h1. You messed up the chapter auto-numbering feature making impossible to generate a TOC. In addition, you disabled internal chapter numbering for level 1 (Heading 1) and replaced this by a custom list style WWW8Num1 which is a clear indication of alien format corruption.

Regarding your “alignment” issue: your chapter title is void (there is nothing after the tabulation) but the tabulation is taken into account to compute the width of the paragraph before centring it. No tab stop has been defined in your h1 paragraph style; therefore Writer uses the default evenly spaced stops (spaced apart 1.27cm unless you customised them). Since THREE is wider than TWO, you end up one tab stop farther and this gives you a wider heading.

Fix: modify your WWW8Num1 list style to request “nothing” after the number. But the real fix would be to include the chapter title in the heading and use a New Line after the number. This requires that you revert to standard Tools>Chapter Numbering configuration and probably you save your document in native format i.e. .odt.

Your document is presently totally unstructured. You should start by reading the Writer Guide and also Bruce Byfield’s excellent book available at the same location. There are too many things to say about your faulty usage of Writer. I’d recommend your restart from scratch methodically and rigorously avoiding absolutely any direct formatting.

If you know what your book should look like, it is easy to deduce which styles to use and how to configure them. Understand first built-in styles (with limited user customisation) before trying to design your own.

And don’t, don’t, don’t mix list numbering with chapter numbering. They should be kept separate unless you really want things going awry.

#4

Thanks for taking such a serious look at it. The template I’m using is not mine, it was given to me by a publisher. I’ll take a look at the Writer Guide and try to learn to use this thing properly!

#5

If you got it from a publisher, you will have to stick to it. Sticking to the template does mean that you use styles instead of direct formatting. The good side of that is that working with styles is much faster and easier than direct formatting, because almost everything is done automatically.

Keep in mind that some things may get lost in conversion, so don’t include features from LibreOffice that may not convert well to MS Word. For instance, don’t waste time on configuring the table of contents, that’s more a job for your publisher, who will probably import the manuscript in some professional page formatting software, and that may mean more losses in conversion.

#6

Thanks! I do not even know what direct formatting is, and I was not aware that I had used it! Something else to learn.

#7

Direct formatting means that you use the formatting toolbar to change font, font size, alignment, and paragraph formatting from the menu instead of modifying the styles.

For instance: the default style for paragraphs is the Default paragraph style. It may have the font Times New Roman, 12 pt. If you don’t like that, you can use the toolbar to change the font to Georgia, 11 pt. That is direct formatting. You should really modify the Default paragraph style. Because what if you change your mind and want 12 pt. after all? You have to select all text and change the size. But wait, you also have headings that you don’t want to change. If you modified the paragraph style, all you have to do is modify it again, and all text with that style will automatically adjust.

#8

And direct formatting is also empty paragraphs to space vertically, tabulations to offset text and spaces in the hope to align words or paragraphs.

If your publisher provided a docx “template” (with quotation marks because the notion of template is completely different in Word and Writer; I rather think that your publisher gave you a “skeleton document”), use Word to avoid all sort of problems.

For example, you already damaged chapter numbering which would not have occurred if you’d used the “template” directly without fumbling with Writer settings.

But even with Word, you need absolutely to understand how to structure a document around an outline. Get help from someone, preferably somebody who has typography experience (beware of those who pretend to master document processing, they usually have no clear idea about literary creation).

1 Like
#9

There seems to also be a discrepancy with storage format.

When opening the file using a recent version of MS Word, I get an error message that “file cannot be opened because file format and file type do not correspond”. Changing filename extension (aka. “file type”) to “.doc” resolves this.

LibreOffice seems to select import filter based on content, not filename extension, so this may not make a difference when you open the file. However, it is strange if you saved the file from LibreOffice Writer and the discrepancy between extension and storage format persists. You’d have to disable the “automatic extension”, I guess.

This is probably not the reason for the issues, but still sufficiently puzzling that I thought it worth mentioning. If you received a Word template from your publisher, you may be better off using Word as your writing tool. Consult your publisher on the possibility of an ODF template (extension .ots.ott) if you still need to be working in LibreOffice.

3 Likes
#10

A Writer template has extension .ott.

#11

Thank you. .Doc is a very old file type, so I’m not sure why it was default saving as that.

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