I am trying to layout a book in Libreoffice Writer. I don’t know if I can do what I need to in Libreoffice. I am using 5.3.6.1 on Windows 7. My book is a story presented bilingually. I want to display L1 on left pages and correlate text in L2 on right pages. In Scribus I would do this with cascading text frames linked together. Ideally I have my story in two subdocuments L1.odt and L2.odt. I want to be able to put these together with Libreoffice masterpages. All the documentation I have read addresses putting chapters together sequentiallyr. I need to have subdocuments which alternate left and right. Is this functionality part of Libreoffice?
There is no way to automate this on Writer, but if you don’t mind to perform some (to be honest, quite a lot of) manual work it is possible to link frames on Writer too. You need to introduce on an empty document as many page breaks as pages you need, set frames each page and then on the properties of each frame link them in order (Options tab on frame properties). Finally, on the first frame of each “series” you can go to Insert → Document.
Yes but doesn’t address the problem of synchronising each “series”, e.g. at chapter start (amongst others due the differing length of text in the languages). I’m afraid there’s no solution for that
The text is laid out like verse poetry (though it is prose) so the two are identical length. I think your solution would work. It is a judgement call whether all the effort is worth it. Another solution I have used is to export L1.odt and L2.odt as pdfs (without header containing page number and chapter). Then I use pdftk to shuffle the pages together. Then in acrobat I add header with page numbers and chapter titles. Not an elegant solution, but it works.
I was hoping Libreoffice might provide this automation so I don’t have to merge multiple files and and content in different environments. That’s what I get for having high needs! Thank you for your responses.