From your update, I see your question is related to page styles. Since you seem to have downloaded the user guide in your own language, read first about page styles which, as you assumed, give structure to your document.
Margins are set in the Page
tab of the style dialog. Header and footer have their own tabs. Pay attention to the checkboxes Same content on first page and Same content on left and right pages. If you uncheck one or both, you create subordinate styles which allow for different header/footer on the designated pages.
Be aware that there can be only one header title per page style (up to 3 if you uncheck the boxes). This means that the title will be the same if you use the same page style for various chapters. This is important for a static title (a title composed only of manually entered text) which will be identically repeated in every chapter. You can circumvent this using field insertion (another advanced feature) to retrieve the content of a heading paragraph (usually the most recent typed as Heading 1).
The technique mentioned above with unchecking boxes is a poor man’s approach and won’t fit your requirement because the margin settings remain the same over the subordinate styles and the header/footer is enabled simultaneously in all of them, with the result that the header or footer area is present whether it contains text or not.
If you want use the header/footer space for your text after the first page, you need to define one page style for the first page and a second one for pages 2+ so that you can disable selectively header/footer. Then you link the page style for pages 2+ into first page style definition (tab Organizer
, drop-down menu Next style). This is the hard point.
Page style changes can be triggered automatically by paragraph styles. This is set in Text Flow
tab, Breaks section.
Read the documentation first. Experiment on a small test document (so that you don’t damage your real one). Come back here when you have questions.
EDIT 2019-1-12
Pages do not exist per se in Writer. They are a consequence of text flow. As soon as text needs space, a page is allocated. This is why you cannot say “I start a page with such layout and I put text into it”. It works the other way round.
Type your text with the required paragraph styling. You can give the allocated pages a specific layout by double-clicking on a page style name in the style side-pane (F11
, fourth icon in toolbar). That is you choose among already defined styles.
Having so given a page style to your text is valid for the current flow, until the next explicit page break (i.e. a voluntarily inserted page break, this is not the same as the automatic flow to next page). Only a page break allows you to change page style for the next group of pages.
-
Page breaks are either inserted manually with Insert
>Manual Break
(don’t use Insert
>Page Break
because it breaks for the same page style) and choosing a specific style from the drop down menu. You can also force the page number to restart at a given number (useful for TOC or indexes).
-
Or page breaks can be made part of paragraph styles through the Text Flow
tab acting on the same settings. This is nice if the page group always start with the same styled paragraph, so that you don’t need to manually insert the break.
These manual page breaks will structure your document in page groups having the same presentation. The range of validity of a page style is from a page break (or document start) to the next page break (or document end).
As you notice, the page style must exist prior the insertion. From your comment, I assume you know hos to customise or create a page style.
There is no way to erase the page style attribute of a part of the text: the text is always composed in a page and this page must have a style, be it Default Style. You know which style is applied at the cursor position as the style in effect is highlighted in the page style list.
Changing the current page style depends on how it was set. For a manual break, just put the cursor in the page and double-click on the new page style. For a paragraph style triggered break, modify the paragraph style (you can also double-click but it creates a direct formatting which conflicts with the style and overrides it, making later edits behave unexpectedly).
To modify a page style, right-click on its name and select Modify
.
You can delete unused styles with a right-click on the name and Delete
. LO Writer will warn you if the style is in use. It will not let you delete built-in styles.
To answer your question about 1 vs. 40 chapter page styles, I need to know how they differ from each other, what is in the header/footer.