Many questions, I fear

[Ellen567]

Say I’m typing a transcript, and I want to automate as much as I can And in one style of transcript, the fist line of the question would be indented, in bold, followed by a colon and two spaces. I guess the best way to do that would be to call it a heading.

I know I can use autocorrect for many abbreviations. But could I add the hard line return from the end of the previous paragraph, and then the indent, question, et cetera?

And in the instance of the answer, had I the name of the person answering, is there a way I could plug that name in as a variable that would be replaced whenever I placed another variable in there?

And if these were new headings, for a transcript, would headingtrns1 be followd by headingtrns2?

I hope that was understandable. I am a little old lady who has never gotten over the loss of WordPerfect and DOS, which could be absolutely lightning fast – and when you are doing piecework, that matters.

Second question: I’m playing around with styles, and say I want a header on the left side on a left page and the right side on a right page. When I lick on “header on” the option for “same content both headers” – or something close to that – is grayed out.

Same with footer.

I seem to remember from OpenWord there was something about headers and footers being in two places in styles – pages and paragraphs? Is that where my problem is?

Many thanks.

Ellen

[mariosv]

LibreOffice Writer Guide

[ajlittoz]

First question: without a sample it is difficult to answer precisely. I feel that a set of paragraph styles with followed by links could automate most of your typing. Some other “intra-paragraph” formatting can be managed with character styles but remember that character styles are switched manually only.

I don’t think using variables for common subtext is practical due to the overhead of setting this up unless, of course, your document is to undergo heavy and frequent editing. Usually, find & replace will do as well and much simpler.

Second question: you can have different header/footer contents on left and right pages if the page styles accounts for more than a single arrangement (otherwise selection is grayed out as you experience). Goto to Page tab of the page style definition and check Layout settings, Page layout: drop-down menu. Only Rignt and left and Mirored will allow different header/footer.

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