Calm down
Passing grudge around is hardly productive. Most people do not find any pleasure in it either. Can we please take a breath here, and look at things which are actual, relevant, and within our abilities?
Please?
Actual situation
A document misbehaving badly?
In my experience there are two typical cases when “wild page flow” occurs in Writer:
- When the document has visited “Microsoft context” (edited in MS Word, saved as a Word file, based on a Word template, or major content copied from a Word document).
- When there is extensive use of formatting elements that restricts free flow (keep with next, no break, widow/orphan settings requiring several lines).
Page header/footer breaking across pages? This also has two common causes:
- Headers/footers mistakenly entered as plain text, instead of into the page style structure of the document. This typically happens when we copy pages from a PDF file or similar, where the structure elements of a document are “flattened out”.
- Page styles with conflicting settings. Again, the Microsoft context is the usual suspect, but it is known to happen in other cases also.
What can we do with what we have
We have a loose description of the problem. With that, we, the user, can suggest possible causes. Sometimes we can also suggest operations to perform, under the assumption of a specific cause. This is guesswork based on guesswork. We do not know the origin of your document, nor the content structure, nor the current state of formatting.
- Contrary to common conception, a wordprocessing document is a fairly complex piece of work. We, the experienced user, can solve a lot of issues when we have the object at hand. We recognize that due to content confidentiality (e.g. intellectual property issues), this situation cannot always be achieved.
- We, the experienced user, can offer advice on possible paths towards solving the issue. This advice will sometimes be of general nature, and describe procedures unfamiliar to the audience. Some effort will be required from both parts.
- We, the experienced user, cannot change the behavior of the tool in any major way. This is for the developer to do. Such operation will take considerable time, and is not likely to solve any issue occurring in existing documents.