I have a 245 page formatted book written on libre 7.3. I am having major issues in getting the page numbers to show at the footer correctly and in sequence. I’ve tried all the online suggestions. If I download the new Libre version and give permission to alter that document, will it change the formatting? I have windows 10.Will the newer version allow page numbering easily?
Can you edit your question to change the tag from base (database) to writer if it is not related to Base.
I haven’t seen page numbers out of sequence; did you mistakenly set a number in the Offset field?
Cheers, Al
The most important thing you should always do, whether you update a program or not, is to back up your valuable documents. See also:
Preventing data disaster
Then you can try it with the available Portable versions of the LO - without uninstalling the older version.
Formatting principles don’t change between releases. So, the generic answer to your question is: no, your book will suffer no alterations.
But …
it also depends on how you “formatted” your book and in which file encoding it is saved.
- text format
There are two broad ways to work with a document processor. The most immediate is direct formatting because it needs no training nor reading the manual. In this approach, you manually insert all your formatting with toolbar buttons or keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+B for bold. The other way is to style your text, i.e. apply so-called styles to bits of your document (paragraph styles to whole paragraphs, character styles to words inside paragraph, page styles to sequences of consecutive pages, frame styles to illustrations and list styles when you have numbered paragraphs).
The most frequent workflow is a mixed approach with paragraph styles applied to create the chapter outline and everything else manual.
The most reliable formatting strategy is styling because it relies on a well-defined model with clear precedence rules and strict description of the effect. It is also unaffected by eventual feature changes in response to bug fixing. Last but not least, it gives you tremendous power and flexibility on final formatting tuning and even the possibility to dramatically change the look of your book without the need to act on the text itself. - file encoding
This is the most important factor. Formatting is guaranteed to remain stable if your file is saved native, i.e. as an .odt file. You didn’t tell. As you mention a “maintained” book, probably for publishing, I fear you saved it in an alien format like .doc(x) as this is the format printshops usually require. In this case, your book incurs a conversion when you open it for editing and yet another conversion when you save. Since the encodings are not the same, features without equivalent in the other format will be approximated during translation with bad cumulative effect over time.
As DOCX is a proprietary closed format, its acceptance is the result of reverse engineering guess work. You’ll be confronted to compatibility issues for any but very simple documents.
If you have any doubt regarding alterations, make a copy of your book and open this copy with the new LO version to check.
Unlikely, but you may check release-notes yourself: LibreOffice 7.5 Community: Release Notes - The Document Foundation Wiki
IMHO an update should not change formatting.