Partitioning of header for Newspaper(left, centered, right justified zones) Does not work

[ghostofamerica]

Please, don’t respond with “it’s automatically done when you open a new document” It isn’t and that’s not a helpful response.

I would like to know how to set the tabs in the header to partition it into left, centered, and right justified zones. I am using 6.4.7.2 on Lmint Ulyssa.

I have tried to set the tabs in the Format–>Paragraph–>Tabs menu, it does not work. That option simply sets tab stops that do not partition the header at all. The justification settings on those tab stops do not work either, the entire header remains justified to the initial line setting.

Please help. This is very frustrating and the only responses that I have seen come up on other peoples questions are belittling non-answers. Perhaps LO is broken? Should I delete and re-download? Is there a crucial update? I update LMint regularly.

Thank you for reading.

Best,
David McNicholas

[Hrbrgr]

Hi, dear @ghostofamerica,

first of all, I hope nobody wants to belittle you here.
All who reply or write comments to questions try to be friendly.
The problem usually lies in communication.

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Now about your problem.

Many questioners here try to solve the formatting by means of so-called direct or hard formatting.
This is in most cases very error prone and also often means unnecessary work.

The magic word is format styles. You can find them in the sidebar ( Ctrl+F5). If your cursor is in the header, you will see in the sidebar at paragraph styles that (most likely) the style "Header " is selected. By right-clicking on the style and selecting “Modify”, you will find yourself in the dialog for the header style. Select the tab “Tabs” and set the tabs for the header.

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However, I personally would advise you not to work with tabs. Instead, use frames, with which you can work very precisely. Frames can also be split.
Maybe this post here can help you:
Layout in Writer

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And here are some general tips on using styles:
Professional text composition with Writer

For a comprehensive overview, please refer to the documentation:
English documentation

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I hope I was able to help you with this.
Good luck.

[ghostofamerica]

@Hrbrgr thanks for your swift response. I feel like my frustration is leaking out. No. no one belittled me, sorry for casting aspersions just because I can’t find the answer myself. I will try your suggestion and get back to report! Thank you!

[ajlittoz]

Tabs are already defined in paragraph style Header. All you have to do is type your left data then Tabfor centered title and Tabfor right margin aligned title.

However if your data in the header needs several lines in each block, I’d rather recommend a 1 row x 3 columns table where you’ll set the column width to your liking. Define a paragraph style for cell content with large enough indents in order to clearly separate columns. You can also define cell padding space if you don’t want to play with indents (or have another use for indents).

With a table, each cell is a subdocument and you benefit from all Writer features.

I don’t recommend frames for such a simple case because you’ll have difficulty to tame the frames if you aren’t familiar with them.