Formatting a book

I am trying to format my novel with the writer and I don’t want page headers or page numbers to start until the body of the book starts. In this case page 9. Nor do I want a header on Chapter pages or pages that start a new part of the book. How do I remove headers and page numbers from select pages as I want done in my manuscript? Without doing this the book will look amateurish.

Try Tutorial page styles, especially the last post, where your situation is outlined. You need three page styles, two predefined and one that you have to define yourself.

1 Like

The key to the solution is page style usage.

A page style defines the layout for a group of pages. The group is delimited by special page breaks (or start and end of file). These special breaks are inserted with Insert>More Breaks>Manual Break which allow to choose which page style will be effective after the break and the starting page number (if not entered, numbering continues sequentially).

Consequently, you need one custom page style for the first 8 pages (without header/footer). Since page number is displayed in header or footer, don’t bother with the number.

Use built-in Default Page Style for the chapter pages. In the Header tab of the page style configuration, activate header and untick Same content on first page. Doing so, the first page of the sequence has an independent header. Leave it blank.

Enter your header in p. 2 and the page number with Insert>Field>Page Number.

Note you can have only one header per page style. Consequently, if you want a different header in each chapter, this is not possible unless your header is “dynamic”, i.e. based on fields. Usually, the header displays the chapter title. This can be done provided you style your chapter title paragraph with Heading 1. In the header, Insert>Field>More Fields, Document tab. Select Chapter in Type and Chapter Name in Format.