How to create one document from parts of many, each with different auto pagination.

[billmccauley]

I am a non-technical person–a writer who has recently ditched Windows in favor of Linux Mint 2.2. I am creating a document from parts of a Word document (2007) which carry automatic pagination, as well as several documents I have created in LibreOffice. I am trying to get a coherent pagination and nothing I do changes the residual Word pagination of the elements I am combining. I have tried everything my meager technical capability permits. I have perused this site and unfortunately my technical illiteracy renders much of what I “read” as beyond my understanding. I do not like getting diverted from my work with these technical matters because my ignorance is such that I must do a LOT of background reading to understand what to the techy seems intuitive. In other words, I am starting to work in Linux at a very low-tech level.

If a low-tech solution is not possible, I prefer to simply finish all my writing and editing, then insert a number for each page and live with that.

Any comments?

[Wanderer]

English is not my mothers tongue, but from your last sentence I guess your question is about page-numbering only?
(Pagination will include also maybe handling different page-sizes etc.)
.
My way to approach your problem would be a master-document, wich imports your separate files/chapters for consistent styling and page-numbering. But I’d never mix Word-files in this, but would convert to .odt first.
.

@billmccauley

If a low-tech solution is not possible, I prefer to simply finish all my writing and editing

As you closed your question with this, I will not waste my time with detailed explanations, you may not use. It is your decision, if you wish to learn something or avoid it for a “once only” job. I have to admit, some are more talented than others but your “what to the techy seems intuitive.” ignores a lot of time for reading and testing wich a lot of the “techies” have spent to simply learn this in a quite classical way. (And some even did this, without internet, so even a “pre-historic” way, as somebody recently wrote.)

[ajlittoz]

Switching from one routine to a new one is a challenge. You face the changes from W$ to Linux. Don’t underestimate the radical change from Word to Writer. The suites are not the same. Documents are not encoded the same and, worse, the standards (ODF and DOCX) don’t cover the same targets. This means documents won’t translate exactly.

To avoid huge problems, your first task should be to convert the documents you want to edit or reuse (leave aside those you consider read-only; even if they don’t convert exactly, it does not matter). If you don’t do that, the documents are converted when you open them and converted back when you saved. This results is progressive cumulative degradation of the file. It becomes noticeable after a number of edit sessions, exactly when it gets unbearable because the document is now large or the product of many hours of work.

The goal is to remove any remnants of Word formatting “approximations”. The only way to do this is:

1. create a new blank document
2. open the .doc(x)* to be converted
3. select all text and copy it
4. switch to the blank
5. Edit>Paste Special>Paste Unformatted Text

Formatting is erased. You must redo it. Also, notes, headers and footers are not copied. You must copy them individually or reconstruct them.

Give us more information about your purpose.

@billmccauley

I am creating a document from parts of a Word document

Do you copy and paste into a new blank document? See what I wrote above about pasting as unformatted text.

@billmccauley

as well as several documents I have created in LibreOffice

Do you want to incorporate them as a whole, unchanged? There are two ways to do this:

• Insert>Text from File which gets a “frozen” copy of the file
• using the master + sub-documents feature
  In this latter case, the master document can be automatically updated when a sub-document changes. However, this is advanced use which requires having read the Writer Guide and fully understood styles. Styling is the basis of formatting control. It radically differs from Word which has a very weak notion of it. IMHO, trying to use master+subs without styles is doomed to fail.

It looks like your problem is a page numbering one as suggested by @Wanderer. Is your document a simple one page-wise? I mean is it a single page configuration where all pages are similar? Same margins, same header, same footer, all pages are numbered from the first to the last (no pages are unnumbered).