I was hoping to see the word chapter clearly defined.
I searched the online LibreOffice help for the definition of chapter today. Such an entry actually appears in the search results, and when clicked, leads to the General Glossary of LibreOffice. The strange thing is that the word chapter features nowhere on that page.
Is this an oversight or an error, or perhaps work yet to be done?
I also searched in an older version of Writer’s offline help, but found no definition of the term.
Can someone here define chapter? I think the way they work is taking a clearer shape in my head now, as I have read many entries that do include the word, and I’ve fiddled with the Navigator, Outline Levels and Chapter Numbering in Writer, but I’d love it if someone could clearly define the term, and I’m sure there are others who feel the same way.
Here I’ve included links that if followed should demonstrate the strange search behaviour I experienced. I searched for chapter at the 1st link, found entries including LibreOffice chapter – definition. When I clicked on entry LibreOffice chapter – definition, I was lead to the 2nd linked page, where the word chapter was nowhere to be found.
A chapter is simply a way of structuring content.
This isn’t something invented by LibreOffice; it’s common knowledge.
If you want to write a book, you can divide it into several chapters.
For instance, LibreOffice documentation—such as the Writer Handbook—is also organized into multiple chapters.
In addition to the Writer Guide, linked by @Hrbrgr you might find Designing with LibreOffice and To Tame a Writer helpful, download link at LibreOffice Bookshelf
I think what you are trying to understand is how to manage the chapters in a book (Writer document) and create tables of contents for the book and for these chapters.
The file I include is just an example of how this can be done. There are probably other ways but I hope this helps you.
Excuse my English. I’m not an English speaker. My_Book.odt (95,5 KB)
Thanks for taking the time to write and post this! I’m nervous about downloading files from others. Can anyone comment on the safety of downloading *.odt files?
It is but the download is hosted off site by the author. You have a choice of pdf or .odt click on one and you will be taken to the author’s site, Download / Buy | , where you will have to choose PDF or odt again.
When I click on either the *.pdf or *.odt, I arrive at addresses in the attached links, and see this messsage, “Error! This download item is not available! It may be unpublished, private, or you may not have permission to view it.”.
Usually .odt files are quite safe, unless they contain macros.
Check your macro security so no macro can be run (without your confirmation).
If you see an alert/question when opening the file you can deny running the macro.
But usually you will see no warning, as there is no macro inside.
Also you may check the profile of the person who uploaded the file. You may see, if the author is around for some time, got likes etc. No absolute safety, but you get an impression…
I am afraid there is no clear answer to your question.
A chapter is apparently a fuzzy notion. See what Wikipedia tells about it.
So, word chapter may be used by different authors to cover different division artefacts. The only common idea is grouping contents to give a “polished” architecture to the whole work and ease “navigation” inside it.
I think your subconscious question is “How can use the various Writer features to organise my book the way I’d like?”.
The primary tool is the outline level designates a paragraph as being part of the outline. You assign the level in a consistent way (in principle). It is your choice and responsibility. For example:
level 1: Volume or Part
level 2: Chapter (as a common reader undesrtands this word)
level 3: sub-chapter, …
or
level 1: Chapter
level 2: sub-chapter, …
As you can see, there is no rigid or constrained assignment of level to “division”.
playing directly with outline level is not particularly user-friendly. Consequently, Writer preboiled a collection of paragraph stylesHeading 1-10 to simplify usage. These styles even have properties others have not.
Numbering is an extra decoration which can be applied to your headings. It is based on the generic list style feature, but this feature is generally considered hard to understand by newcomers (mainly by Word switchers because this abstract notion does not exist in M$ Word). Once again, managing directly the numbering is quite hard to avoid undesired interference with other lists and the pain to configure it correctly. So, Writer provides an internal, protected, exclusive style dedicated to chapter numbering.
You control both the outline style membership and numbering in Tools → Heading Numbering. This is the easiest and most reliable method.
One word of caveat: newcomers frequently assign explicitly list numbering to headings. Never do that; you create a conflict between the internal list and a user-defined one. Use Tools → Heading Numbering exclusively.
The standard collection of Heading 1-10 covers the common case where you have a single numbering category, i.e. you only have chapters with numeric identification. If you want to have both 1. Chapter and A. Appendix (one numeric list, the second alphabetical), you need two list styles (because a level can have only one type of number). Then you need to know all the detailed subtleties about paragraph styles, outline level assignment and custom list style creation. Combining all those together is already an advanced job. Unfortunately, the paragraph styles won’t inherit all the nice “special” properties brought by Tools → Heading Numbering. In particular, you need to explicitly attach your heading to the ad hoc list level.
If you need more information, tell which aspect should be detailed.
For the moment I’m not focusing on lists or numbering, but instead how chapter is defined in the context of a table of contents and the paragraph styles named Headings 1 – 10.
I have a document containing paragraphs styled with Headings 1, 2, 3 and 4. When I add a table of contents to a document and assign it to “Chapter” only and not “Entire document”, depending on where between the Heading 1 – 4 styled paragraphs I insert them, include different contents.
For the purposes of my post, I’ll rank Heading 1 the highest, and Heading 4 the lowest. It seems to me that if I insert a chapter specific table of contents into a document, it will include the single Heading * styled paragraph that directly precedes it in the document, and all of the ones after it, if they are of a lower rank than it. And the next occurrence of a paragraph of style Heading 1 after that table of contents, seems to end the chapter as far as the table of contents is concerned.
This document also has a page style applied to it the specifies a header and footer. When I place a table of contents in it, it behaves a little differently, but I’ll not go into that for now.
So, how would you define chapter in the context of headings in a table of contents?
In other words: Are you looking for a TOC for each chapter, located in the very beginning of a specific or any chapter?
(There could be a workaround for that.)
EDIT
Writer itself seems to define chapters by Heading 1 when generating a ToC. You surely could “play” with some properties of the ToC dialog. See attached screenshot:
Regarding the “chapter TOC” feature, word Chapter is highly ambiguous.
First, as I mentioned earlier, there no agreement on a formal definition of “chapter”, i.e. which kind of division is this.
Second, a “partial” TOC can be inserted anywhere. Therefore it has to be context-sensitive.
Developers chose to adopt word “chapter” for the starting point/level for the table. The location of the partial TOC defines the starting level from the outline state at this location. For example, if you are presently below a Heading 3, the starting level will be 3. The ending level is under your control because there is a field in the dialog.
However, since there are as many requirements as users, I am not satisfied with the present feature. It has been implement in kind of one-size-fits-all. I’d like more control on the starting point.
If I insert my “chapter” TOC immediately after the “chapter” heading, I prefer not to repeat this heading because it is visible immediately above. This is not possible. And what if I want to list shallower levels as a reminder in a long long document (e.g. level 1 & 2 for a level-3 partial TOC)?
For these reasons, I’d like to be able to request the starting level to be listed in the partial TOC. Caution! This does not mean that TOC scanning and collection would start on the indicated level; no, these shallower levels are only “one-shot without dependency” reminders and could be captured from the context. TOC scanning should start at level+1 and end where you asked for. Otherwise the “partial” TOC does not comply with its expectation.
PS: in very old releases, “chapter” was hard-wired to level-1 and partial TOCs in deeper levels were automatically faulty.
Since there are different ways to respond/comment, and it seems like everyone responds differently, I’m linking to my selfr in this post. I have included a file with a posible solution
I’m nervous about downloading files from others. Can anyone comment on the safety of downloading *.odt files?
