Your main problem is your formatting. Everything is done manually.
In Writer, the fundamental workflow is style usage. The most important category is paragraph style. A style assigns a semantic significance to your paragraph. You, as an author, define what your paragraph stands for. You’ll assign Comment, Remark, Important, Citation to paragraph which have such value for you (you may have to create these styles). Common discourse will be assigned Text Body.
Default Paragraph Style should never be used for any text in Writer. This special style is the ancestor of all others which inherit the attributes if they don’t override them. It is a convenient way to define shared attributes among styles, e.g. the common font face.
A style is then customised to translate visually the significance. For example, Title is the built-in style ntended for the book title. You will usually center-align its text and give ample spacing above and below the text.
The fact that spacing is part of the style definition means you must not vertically space your text with empty paragraphs. Empty paragraphs have no meaning. Then, according to what I wrote about styles, “no meaning” implies there is no empty paragraph otherwise you logically contradict yourself: you give significance to empty text!
Your cover page is styled Default Paragraph Style instead of Title (and perhaps Subtitle for the auhor’s name).
The legalese page is also styled Default Paragraph Style instead of some specific style like Copyright and others. Your use of Text Body for the copyright text is faulty.
As already mentioned in comments, chapter headings should be styled Heading 1 unless you have “parts” with titles you want to appear in TOC.
Your case is already advanced use because you want a heading with its number on a separate line. This can be done with a suitable customisation of Tools>Chapter Numbering (which you have already messed up). I’ll explain only level 2. Adapt to other levels.
- in
Position
- set Numbering alignment to
Centered
-
Numbering followed by
New Line
- in
Numbering
-
Number to
1, 2, 3, …
- restore Paragraph style to
Heading 2
-
Character style will need some adjustment
- set Separator Before to "Chapter " (with a trailing space)
Now all your chapter headings are automatically numbered. To remove the number before “Foreword”, put the cursor before the word and press Backspace.
You also need to remove literal “Capitulo” you added in the structure line for the TOC. Unfortunately, you can’t automatically remove the “:” before FOREWORD in the TOC, unless you put it into Separator After, but it will also appear in every heading. It is your choice.
The “FOREWORD” can also be automatically inserted in the page header as you did for the other chapters.
However I wonder if your document has ever been in contact with M$ Word because you have many Convertedx page styles. This will create problems when you tune your layout. Word is known to pollute and mess up document formatting because it knows only of paragraph styles and has no notion of character, page, frame and list styles.
Your best friends in formatting are styles, all categories of styles. Avoid as much as you can direct formatting otherwise you’ll never succeed in formatting your book the way you like. Presently, your document is doomed to fail because it is mainly styled Default Paragraph Style with direct formatting added without any character style.
Note about your multi-line headings.
I mentioned a Character style entry in Tools>Chapter Numbering. If you want the number to be different from the heading (font size and weight mainly), define a character style with the required attributes (don’t change font face unless this is a specification so that it inherits the font face defined in the paragraph style). Once it is created, select it in the Character style menu and you numbering will be automatically adjusted.
Sample file with only small adjustments in Chapter>Numbering: for-libreoffice-forum-ajl.odt (19.9 KB)
