To design a page for my book! What makes this easy? Using frames?
(the standard lay-out for each page)
Please reword your question. Describe what you want into your page (with elements go into it: pictures, text, âŚ). Is this a one-of-a-kind page, e.g. the front cover of a book, or a recurrent page, e.g. the one use for all pages in a chapter?
By ârewordâ, I mean ârewrite your questionâ. This site is not a forum. Every question, answer or comment is editable and can be modified. Donât use a comment because potential contributors would have to read a whole string of comments before understanding the issue. It is more friendly to group everything at a single place as the discussion has not yet begun.
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This is what I mean: the one use for all pages in a chapter?
General strategy
Typically, a book is a single âstream of consciousnessâ spread out across as many pages as are required. The page does not stand out as an element of its own, but merely serves to promote the content.
Writer manages this by way of the page style. The style contains page format information (size and orientation, pagination, page headers/footers, page coloration, borders). New pages are created on the fly as content is added to the âstreamâ.
If your book has chapters and you want a special page design for starting a new chapter, you create a separate, named page style for that. Then you assign this style to start whenever you use the Heading 1 Paragraph style. Use the Heading 1 paragraph style for chapter headings. Do not format your headings manually. Alter the style settings instead.
With this, when you decide that you want to adjust the layout in some way, you change the styles, and everything updates accordingly.
For a DTP-like workflow you need proper DTP software. There is the concept of âframe styleâ in Writer, but using frames in Writer with a DTP mindset, you would still need to create and link each frame individually, and do some manual work on each of them whenever you adjust layout.
If you need more specific advice, or your book does not conform to my âstream of consciousnessâ assumption, tell us more about how you want your book design/structure laid out.
I get confused whether to use a Master document or not?
Donât. You have to get comfortable with the basics of Writer before you start with the hard things.
Many years ago, I learned from foxcole (formerly active on oooforum.org and on forum.openoffice Index page ⢠Apache OpenOffice Community Forum) whatâs probably the best use for page styles now that you can easily edit huge documents in Writer. Itâs to have different formats for the same set of documents. So you have a set of documents that you published as articles, now you want them in book form. Do you totally reformat them? No, you make a master document and insert all of those documents in it, then you modify the styles in the master document, without changing the originals.
I donât understand your comment!
Do you recommend to make a Master document or donât you âŚ? or first learn the basics and after that make a Master document?
What is not clear about âDonâtâ?
You start with âDonâtâ and at the end you mention a Master document!
I say No. Then I say why I say No. I gave an example of when you can use a master document, and you want something totally different.
A master document is like a binder into which you collect several folios. The master is equivalent to the binder. It has a sort of dictionary which tells which sub-documents to include in the binder and in which order. A master document has nothing to do with page design.
As @keme1 points out, page design is defined by a page style (sheet size, margins, header and footer dimensions, number of columns and many other options).
If all these words (styles, master, text flow control, âŚ) sound Klingon to you, I recommend you start by reading the Writer Guide.
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If you are not certain that you definitely need a master document, you should not use one.
There may be a confusion of terms. I suspect that the term âMasterâ has led your thoughts towards a file with the governing structure elements for a new document of a certain type. In LibreOffice terminology, this type of file is called a âtemplateâ. A template is a contentless file which is normally not edited in itself. New documents are created based on (as a copy of) the template file. Using a template is useful in order to have a consistent structure on all of your documents.
LibreOfficeâs âMasterâ file is a file with content. Usually, a major part of a master fileâs content is imported from other documents (referred to as subdocuments). @ajlittozâ binder analogy is a good way to visualise the master document.
Using a master document makes sense in a couple of situations where documents are built in a complex context.
E.g.:
- When a document is used as a subdocument within many different masters.
- When different people work on different, more or less independent, parts of the main document.
- When you want coexisting multiple designs for the same content (as explained in @anon87010807âs first comment)
So, a master document is a slightly advanced tool. Do not use it unless you know for certain that you need it.
Styles are useful tools to help you maintaining a consistent formatting within your document.
A template is useful if you create multiple documents, to have the same consistency from one document to the next.
I repeat myself
- Styles in your document is a good way to achieve consistency.
- A template file can hold your named styles, and is useful to forward the consistency to your next document
- If you write different types of documents, you may need different templates.
- You may never need to use a master document. For myself, I canât recall ever needing one.
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Not exactly. It can have contents which will be âloadedâ into the standard document at creation time only. Afterwards, only style modifications are forwarded. This initial contents is part of the âgoverning structure elementsâ and can make use of placeholders to hint author about what is supposed to be entered where.
As an example of initial contents, one of my sophisticated templates comes with full cover page, followed by a legalese page (copyright, licence), a revision history page, TOC, skeletal chapter (reduced to a Heading 1 and empty Text Body paragraphs), ending with an empty Alphabetical Index.
I make heavy use of File>Properties. Finalizing the cover page is only a matter of entering details in the Description and Custom Properties tabs. This automatically populates the headers (and footers) which retrieve elements (title, revision number, âŚ) with fields pointing to properties.
It is easier to remove something than to build correctly book architecture components. So, my template exhibits the most complex requirements which are then simplified for the given case.
@keme1, @anon87010807: if youâre interested, I can send you my template description through private mail.
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So, (finally) I use a single document WITH a template?
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Can you send me an example of a template, please?
You seem very confused. From this, I suppose youâre in the preliminary steps of discovering what Writer can do. It is a very powerful tool. You should not try to experiment all its features without mastering the basics. Writer allows several workflows. A workflow is a way to organise the job of writing documents. Tools are provided to automate this workflow.
The most rudimentary use of Writer is the mechanical typewriter (this is severely frowned upon): you do everything manually with spaces, tabs and empty lines to lay out your text. But you really donât need Writer for this and miss the user-friendliness of the program.
Next you learn to use styles:
- paragraph styles to give the global outline of a paragraph (its font face and size, lateral margins â called Indents --, its spacing above and below, its borders, itds relation to its environment â whether it can split across page breaks, cause a page break, make a block with next paragraph, how widow/orphan line are handled, âŚ)
- character styles to define a variation for a word inside a paragraph (mainly font face, size and weight; but position or colour are possible)
- page styles to structure a sequence of pages for layout (margins), header, footer, footnotes area size, page number format, âŚ
- list styles to describe the style of numbering in list and the indentation per level (this already requires advanced skill)
- frame styles to control position of pictures, drawings or even secondary text and how they interact with main text (and you really need higher skills here to master them)
You soon note that styles are stored inside the document and reentering your custom styles is a real burden (even if you can import styles from other documents). Templates are then the kind of files where you can store your custom styles for reuse. When properly configured, any update to a template can be propagated automatically to existing documents when you edit them.
You can build a template library for your recurring documents: letters, articles, books, manuals, contracts, ⌠And these templates can contain initial text for fixed bits like place and date, name, address and signature placeholder for a letter.
The last level in workflow is the master+sub-docs feature. It is no longer real day-to-day need for it unless youâre in the specific use case for which it was intended, i.e. sharing parts between documents, having several different formats/layouts from the same unique source or collaborative work. It was useful when computers had very small RAM (say 512MB) and Writer could not handle directly âbigâ documents (it used to be difficult at around 200 pages and below in presence of pictures). Today, you can go up to 800-1000 pages, depending on number of pictures, without pain.
So, I may be stuttering, but start by reading the Writer Guide for the basics and Writer âwhereâs whatâ. Next read Bruce Byfieldâs Designing with LibreOffice to get an idea about what styles can bring to you. And, practice, practice, practice, first on dependable to-be-thrown-away small documents.
My templates are very complex and Iâm afraid they could have the opposite result: to frighten you and make you wave away the feature. But if you insist, I can.
EDIT:
In the long evolution of your workflow with Writer, I forgot to mention two steps related to style learning.
In the beginning, newbies (I was one myself) intuitively name their styles by the visual effect they have. E.g. you create an Italics character style to apply italics (I know there is already Ctrl+I as direct format). But you soon realise that italic look is often given to completely different sequences. Italics is frequently used to highlight moderately important items, introduce the definition of some word, denote irony or flag foreign words.
What to do when your publisher or supervisor wants you to use underline for word definition? Your canât just change the character (paragraph, page, âŚ) style because it is also applied to important words.
The method to handle such a common case is to name your styles for the significance of the sequence. With the example above, youâd have Emphasis, Definition, Irony and Foreign. Now you can tune separately the different semantic categories.
Take a look at the built-in styles. Their names reflect intended use, not the visual effect. In fact, you must customise built-in styles to get a collection so that a real document complies with your graphical charter.
Hi,
Thank you very much!
Yes, please send me a template?
Thanks!
Luchador
There is a site dedicated to various templates for LO; This link has Writer templates of various types for download.
Thank you very much!
Dutch documentation on templates and styles. You will find everything that you want here. You will find more on Documentatie | LibreOffice - Een aantrekkelijk, leuk project, with some updates as well.