I’m a novelist and would like to know how to remove headers and footer page numbers from some pages, like the copywrite page. I do not want headers or footers to begin until the first page of text, which in most cases is page seven. I hope someone can answer my question and email me with the answer.
Your book is made of several “parts” with their own layout. Each part should be associated with a page style which will allow you to define the layout and other properties of the sequence.
These parts must be delimited by a “boundary” which is a special page break created with Insert>More Breaks>Manual Break. This pops up a dialog and you choose the page style to activate after the break.
Each page style, therefore each “part”, has its own header and footer and also its page numbering sequence (you can start at any number) and type (none, Roman, alphabetical, numeric, …).
I recommend you read the Writer Guide for an introduction to styles. Styles are really very powerful tools leading to formatting automation. Thanks to that, as an author, you focus your attention on contents, leaving aside automatically handled formatting. And if you’re not satisfied with this formatting, you can optimise it at a later stage without modifying your contents (provided you fully styled your contents).
PS: always mention OS name and LO version as there are subtle differences between platforms and versions. Also, formatting stability is only guaranteed if you save native, .odt not .doc(x). In particular, page styles don’t exist in DOCX and are approximately rendered with Word “sections”.
It’s incredible that I would have to go through all of this trouble just to format this change on a few pages.
It’s incredible…
@nancynovelist ,
You can submit a suggestion for improvement on Bugzilla and tell us what you think would be easier to do.
1 Like
This may appear a “trouble” because you have a very simple book structure. Writer can manage incredibly complex layouts. And this “trouble” is a very elegant and indeed ‘straightforward’ way of handling the problem. Remember that Writer is a sophisticated tool and reading the manual is a prerequisite to master it. Considering its tremendous power, I consider that the present state of affairs is quite simple (but it took me years to develop a satisfactory mental model).