How to insert a new empty page without a page break?

As per the title, insert a new page in the middle of a document without upsetting the flow of elements on other pages. I’ve been trawling the menus to no avail. I often find myself looking for this option as I use a lot of page anchoring which means a page break results in broken content flow.

To be painfully clear, here is an example with a 2 page document:

  • Insert blank page n into document after page 1 and before page 2
  • Page 2 is now page 3 with all contents/elements intact as when it was page 2
  • Page n (aka new page 2) is a blank page with no contents apart from any doc formatting e.g header/footer

[The original question was “Anybody know how to insert a new page? (not a page break)”. I edited it slightly to give other guys chewing a similar task a chance to find this thread. @Lupp]

And this is the problem with anchoring to a page; those elements stay anchored to that particular page. Other anchoring methods move with the text flow.

Maybe you needed to use Draw for your layout? Or possibly a DTP program like Scribus?

I had a feeling I’d burrowed into building my docs using a method that was going to cause me problems! I have a large template with a lot of page-specific graphics and paragraph anchor was a nightmare as while I was jumping back and forth through the doc editing layouts, the remainder of the doc was getting pushed around.

I’ll check out draw, I don’t think I’ve used it but also definitely going to download Scribus. I’ve not used a DTP before but after a quick read, it looks like it might be exactly the tool I’m trying to turn LibreOffice into. Thanks for the pointer!

Anchoring graphics As character tames them. You cannot have more than one line of text beside them but if you have columns then a graphic taking a column width isn’t a problem

FAQ

You can’t do that

In Draw and Impress, pages (aka “slides”) exist as individual objects. In Writer and Calc, pages are generated as needed to accomodate content. You cannot create a page.

For the record: The tabbed sheets in Calc do not constitute pages. The grid is simply available space to put your content in. A 1024x1048576 sheet without content will amount to 0 - zero - pages.

You can emulate it

The best emulation of a “page object” I can think of in Writer is a frame, no borders, sized to page’s text area. The frame is not a page in itself, but will force creation of one.

Insert - Frame > - Frame ...

Whether anchoring is best done to page, paragraph or character depends on setting.

Use the best tool for the job

Scribus, as advised in the comments, is a better tool when you need to control page layout/sequencing, for all but the simplest of needs. Some learning curve to navigate, but nothing to worry about I guess.

For the record: The tabbed sheets in Calc do not constitute pages

You are absolutely right when talking about “paper” pages (something that gets output to external media, e.g. PDF). But just FTR, Calc internally combines the complexity of static “pages” and dynamic “pages” - its tabs relate to pages in Draw, and its content created dynamic pages like in Writer. This appears when you use UNO with its draw pages (XDrawPages/XDrawPage), that are multiple (per page in Draw, per slide in Impress, per tab in Calc, only one in Writer).

Thanks for confirming my suspicion with your clear answer. Based on this answer and the comments I now know I’m using the wrong tool for my intentions. I’m pushing forward with Scribus to build my doc layouts and saving Writer for what it does best - word processing. Thanks all

I’m pushing forward with Scribus to build my doc layouts and saving Writer for what it does best - word processing

This is very reasonable approach; but taking into account

  • Insert blank page n into document after page 1 and before page 2
  • Page 2 is now page 3 with all contents/elements intact as when it was page 2
  • Page n (aka new page 2) is a blank page with no contents apart from any doc formatting e.g header/footer

it looks perfectly OK to do this in Writer, having images on ex-page 2 paragraph-anchored and page-positioned, and use page breaks (or just add content before) as needed.

@mikekaganski having considered the solutions further, the fact I was on a deadline and had already committed a few hours to building a 20 page doc, I trialled the emulation which worked fine but for the sake of future reusability opted to slog through the elements re-anchoring to paragraph and properly setting attributes to get it all to play nicely. The perseverance paid off as I’m now well into having an awesome template which now laid out properly is really easy to work with. In less than 12 hours I went from loathing Writer to loving it. My mistake was diving straight in and hacking and slashing with my MS Word knowledge which is almost entirely non-transerable to Writer. Unlike WPS which is practically a clone of Office. I recently severed my reliability on all proprietary software after realising I was straight up depressed about the closed format ‘traps’ and the ever more-aggressive attempts at trying to pry un-earned coin from my hand. Now I’ve found my Word replacement :+1:

(I don’t need any longer complicated structures of text documents, and I don’t know Scribus from own experience. However, I am a friend of a limited toolbox allowing to know a few powerfull tools well, and to use them in a flexible way. I don’t feel capable of getting sufficiently familiar with Writer and Scribus and … to use each tool the way it requires. Having learned from this Q&A site and from two formus concerning open office software I also contributed to, there are lots of users who also have problems to get familiar with at least one new tool - in their cases Writer e.g.
Therefore I elaborated the “emulation” suggested by @keme in the following example.)

How to emulate extra pages and secondary textflows using frames of a specialized FrameStyle anchored ‘As Character’ and with frame linkage if needed. (The main text shall flow over the insertions.)
See attachment for an example.
ask302665VerySpecialEtraPagesWithExtraTextFlow.odt