How do you get footers to display page numbers alternately?

[daleraby]

OK, I am getting a manuscript ready. It will be formated wih LibreOffice Writer, then exported as a .pdf document so that Boxcar Press can generate polymer plates for me to print the book on a platen press.

My problem is with page numbers in the footer. I want the right page to display the page number aligned right and the left page to align the page number on the left. As it is, I can align all the page numbers either right or left, but then they are all that way. For reasons that are beyond the scope of this query, I cannot use a centered page number.

None of the instructions available seem to address this issue properly. The style of the header or footer seems to follow the style of the page, so if I want the page number aligned right, then I must have all the text on the page right alligned as well. Very frustrating for something that seems so simple to implement. Only workaround I can come up with is to eliminate the footer entirely and manually put in a page number at the end of each page in my final step before exporting to the pdf… that or lock up the number in the chase and print it with lead type.

Is it really this difficult or am I missing something?

[gabix]

Read this tutorial and this tutorial.

[Lupp]

You need to switch off (uncheck) Same content on left and right pages under Format > Page... > Footer. You will the be able to insert text and fields differently aligned into the footer.

[daleraby]

Thanks. I finally stumbled over that. When that box is unchecked, then you can use the text alignment tool to align it right and left, though for some reason, after the first two pages were done, all the rest followed properly.

[Lupp]

Quoting @daleraby: “… though for some reason, after the first two pages were done, all the rest followed properly.”
The “some reason” is that there is only one footer by default assigned to a Page... format. If you split that up to the extreme you get three variants: One for the first page, one for all the left pages (except first if left), and one for all the right pages (except first if right). Each of these has one content and one format.