How to control gutter position in a set of pages with a given style that begins with a left-side page?

English
#1

When formatting a book using Libre Office Writer 7.6 on Windows 10 Pro, how do I gain control over which side the gutter is on on the first page with a given style, allowing the gutter position then to alternate on subsequent pages? In particular, how do I ensure the gutter is on the inner side when the first page of a given style has an even number as far as the entire book is concerned?

Since it’s an even-numbered page in the book, it should have the gutter on the right. But LOW is putting the gutter on the left, presumably because it’s an odd-numbered page (the first) as far as that particular style is concerned.

Editing the style, I can choose “mirrored” and then for the gutter position “Left” (using a menu). This starts with a gutter on the left, which is wrong, but on subsequent pages it alternates. So they’re all wrong, but at least the alternation itself is correct!

Or I can choose “mirrored” and then I can leave the menu setting as “Left” but click the checkbox saying to put the gutter on the right. (I have no idea why the program does it like this). Then what happens is that that section starts with a gutter on the right, which is correct, but on subsequent pages there is no longer any mirroring and every page has a gutter on the right, which is wrong for half the pages.

Perhaps there is a global setting, so I can simply ensure that for odd-numbered pages as far as the book is concerned have the gutter on the left, and even-numbered ones have it on the right? If there is such a setting, where is it? If there isn’t, how can I achieve the same thing?

EDIT
There may be something strange going on with breaks in my document. When I zoom to see an “Entire page” in a view, and start scrolling from the very beginning, first the notice at the bottom says “Page 1”, and then when the first part of the next page appears, I see “Pages 1 and 2”. That is of course thoroughly normal. But curiously, when the first offending (wrongly gutter-sided) page shows, with its first part in the display along with the last part of the preceding page, the notice says “Pages 9-11 of 270 [Pages 3-3]”. This is peculiar, because parts of only two pages are viewable, not three. This may have something to do with my problem?

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#2

Trying to create your layout, I fell at the first hurdle of numbering a left hand page with 1
PageNumbersCannotBeApplied

To see the missing page, either click the Book View icon at the bottom right next to the zoom slider, or click print preview.

You can choose not to print the blank pages in either:

  • The print dialogue, tab LibreOffice Writer and untick the box Print automatically inserted blank pages, or
  • By default in Tools > Options > LibreOffice Writer > Print and untick the box Print automatically inserted blank pages

Maybe the trick is not to have an automatic page break for Heading Numbering (previously Chapter Numbering)

#3

Thanks for your help.
The righthand pages in my document (a book) are odd-numbered. Specifically: I start with eight unnumbered pages of front matter. Then the next page is a chapter title page which is nominally page 1 but doesn’t have a page number printed on it. The following page is the first substantive page of the first chapter and is the first page to have a number printed on it, which is even (2) because it’s a lefthand page. Each chapter has a title page that is on a righthand page, and then the first substantive page of each chapter begins on a lefthand page. The page before a chapter’s title page is blank if it has to be.

#4

How many page styles are you using?

I don’t do anything with the gutter setting. I prefer having right-hand pages with a larger left margin to allow for binding and left-hand pages with a larger right margin for binding. For the right-hand page style, I set Next style to the left-hand page style. For the left-hand page style, I set Next style to the right-hand page style. I set up a separate page style for the start of a chapter. This has a larger top margin. The Next style for this page style is the left-hand page style.

Setting up the page styles like this, the text flows from right page to left page to right page automatically as needed. If a chapter ends on a right page, I go to Insert>More Breaks>Manual break. In the dialog, I check Page break. For Page Style, I choose my chapter page style. When I click OK, the cursor goes to a right-hand chapter page. LibreOffice Writer has automatically inserted a blank page on the left.

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#5

I guess you set Chapter Title Page page style to be a right page only.
You can do Right and Left pages with different margins for the Default Page Style or you could do mirrored which conveniently shows Inner and Outer margin settings.
Whatever heading style you use for the Chapter Title Page could be set in the Text Flow tab to have a page break before it with page style of Chapter Title Page. Something like attached?
ChapterTitlePageOnRight.odt (12.3 KB)

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How do you apply 2 different page styles to subdocuments (sections) in you master document?
#6

This saved my day ! :slight_smile: thank you

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