How to find a section start and finish

oliverb · November 21, 2018, 11:37am

I’m working with a document that originated in Word and it has a number of Word-style “Section breaks”, which appear to work more like a “super pagebreak” than a Libreoffice section.

In “Edit Sections” I see numbered sections but these don’t seem to relate to anything in the document. I can’t see the section breaks, they seem to have turned into something more like page breaks, which in turn just show as indistinct dotted lines.

Clearly there is still some kind of break in the document as the footer changes as it goes from one page to the next, but I cannot see the specific point where this happens, and there is a block of text that I would quite like to mark as a section distinct from the rest of the document but I cannot see how to do this.

How can I tell where Sections 1, 2 and 3 in the sections menu actually appear in the text?

Clarification: I did have formatting marks enabled.

Grantler · November 21, 2018, 1:57pm

If there are real sections you could apply a background or area color - then the section’s text area will be filled with it.

Nevertheless your “document that originated in Word” is derived and converted so there can be some weird problems nobody will understand. If I were you I would erase each of the converted sections and then set them anew if required. Check the page styles (you can see the current one where the cursor is located in the status bar).

For more help upload anonymized file.

Grantler · November 21, 2018, 2:00pm

If the footer changes this is a sign of changed page style. Typical for Writer.

ajlittoz · November 21, 2018, 3:58pm

You didn’t tell if you enabled View>Formatting marks, though I suppose you did it from your remark … show as indistinct dotted lines. This helps a lot to see the structure of the document.

oliverb · November 22, 2018, 8:58am

So it could just be differences between Word and Writer at work here: As far as I can tell a Word “section” only has one page style, two if you count the first page being different from those following, so a “section” boundry marks the transition from one page style to another. This does mean the footer can change mid-page (I can’t recall which footer gets used when it splits like that).

It looks as if a Writer “section” means something totally different more like an embedded doc

ajlittoz · November 22, 2018, 9:12am

A section doesn’t cause a transition of page style, only a page break can. A section is a subpart of page, allowing to change some “geometric” properties (like number of colums, the main usage of it) but not header nor footer which are exclusive properties of page styles.

As @Grantler noted, if you have a footer change, then you have some kind of page break associated with a page style change, unless footer content is generated from fields referring to some heading bookmark.

ajlittoz · November 22, 2018, 9:13am

Can you attach a reduced version of your document exhibiting the issue?

Lupp · November 22, 2018, 9:52am

@ajlittoz: The OP may need a bit of “karma” to be able to accept your suggestion.
I’m going to upvote the question therefore.

oliverb · November 22, 2018, 10:54am

I appreciate the offer but it is a bit of a monster. I think it needs to stay in Word for the immediate future, there’s just too much clean-up required.

mikekaganski · November 22, 2018, 10:56am

When you are inside a section, first Ctrl+A select the content of the section. It won’t work that way, if you are in a table, though (after selecting the cell and the table, the following Ctrl+A selects the whole document - I believe this to be a bug). When you are in a nested section. first Ctrl+A selects the inner one; next one selects the outer one; eventually, you select the whole document.