Page breaks between subdocuments in master documents

[makilahy1]

I’ve set up a master document and started inserting files after the table of contents. After inserting, I move them down to the bottom of the Navigator list, but each chapter in my book rams up against the back of the previous chapter without a page break.

If I insert Text between the chapters, I can hit Enter a couple of times and then get the option to insert a Manual Break, but it leaves a blank line at the top of the first page of every chapter.

Am I doing something wrong? I’m following the instructions from the 7.2 guide: Chapter 16 Master Documents (libreoffice.org)

I’m running LO 7.2.0.4 (64-bit) on Windows 10.

[ajlittoz]

How do you format your chapters? Manually or with styles?

If you can’t delete the blank line from the master document, then either it exists in the subdocument or it is part of the paragraph style spacing. Since you didn’t enable View>Formatting Marks, it is impossible to tel from the screenshots.

When dealing with master + subs, it is of the utmost importance (evan more than with single-file ordinary document) to format exclusively and consistently with styles (and all style categories: paragraph of course, character, page, frame and list). Prohibit direct formatting otherwise you be confronted with formatting nightmare.

For better diagnosis, attach the sample file(s) corresponding to the screenshots.

[makilahy1]

@ajlittoz I format with styles. The chapter cover page at the start of each document contains a single Heading 1 (no extra lines), an image anchored “to paragraph” (manually positioned), and a small frame of quotation text anchored “to paragraph” (aligned at the very bottom of the page).

I turned on Formatting Marks as you suggested, but initially saw nothing unexpected. Taking a fresh look at the original subdocuments, I had an idea, and it seemed to fix everything:

I had a page style that did not suppress the header on the chapter cover pages, and that “space” seemed to be causing the main problem. Suppressing the header on those pages fixed the spacing. I was even able to remove the spare “Text” block in the master document and preserve the page spacing.

[mikekaganski]

@makilahy1

I move them down to the bottom of the Navigator list, but each chapter in my book rams up against the back of the previous chapter without a page break.

This is normal - until you explicitly define page breaks in the beginning of your chapters in some way. The best way is to check that your chapter’s first paragraph style - some kind of heading - has a page break before setting.

[makilahy1]

@mikekaganski I found what you were talking about under the Text Flow tab for the paragraph style. It’s not enabled, yet I got it working by instead changing the page style to suppress the header. So I’m not sure if this is necessary…