This is terrifying, I ticked View > Whitespace and my 142 page doc now reports 196 pages. No damage done, I tick again and size is back to 142, but it scares the pants off me.
Version: 26.2.0.3 (X86_64)
Build ID: afbbd0df0edb6d40b450b0337ac646b0913a760c
CPU threads: 4; OS: Linux 6.1; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: en-CA (en_CA.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded
→ How to Report Bugs in LibreOffice - The Document Foundation Wiki
see also 168972 – [DOCX] [OPEN] Page count in Writer's Property Statistics is completely wrong
View>Whitespace should always be enabled for WYSIWYG rendering. When disabled margins and page separation are suppressed, resulting in a more compact display. It should not change the total page count. If it does, there is something else in your document.
Ok, so this is a possible bug? Should I do as fpy says, or
sla.odt (203.4 KB)
… there’s the whole doc for your inspection? It’s pretty big but …
I experience the same behaviour with 25.8.4.2, so, there is no regression bug. With Whitespace ticked, your document is reported 142 pages-long; unticked, it says 198 or even 215 pages depending on where the cursor is when I untick the checkbox.
I found something very weird: when whitespace is suppressed, Writer seems to be completely lost when computing page breaks.
A caricature of this happens at page 30/142. My eye caught German word Waldsterben. This page contains 4 paragraphs (starting at “future yield”), some empty area and 3-line single-paragraph note 23.
Suppressing whitespace, Waldsterben is now in page 45/198. But this page contains only 2 parts of paragraphs. The first one starts at “can be expected” (its beginning is on the previous page) and the second one is cut at “the cause”, showing only 2 lines. Continuation of paragraph is on next page for 2 lines only with first line of note 23 and end of both in the following page. “future yield” starts a line at bottom third of page.
It is obvious that page splitting is completely messed up.
I could trace the first discrepancy to the first table in page 6: after caption “Key to Books and Authors”. a page break is added (whitespace suppressed), separating the table from its caption. Several other tables also have unexpected page breaks.
I alos note that most of your tables have manually-forced widths instead of the Writer-natural mode of extending from margin to margin. Not sure if this contributes to the phenomenon.
Presently, I’d suggest you don’t focus on this bug. Writer is supposed to be WYSIWYG, i.e. View>Whitespace ticked. Unticking it is just a convenience for those who want a very compact display, not representative of the final result. Just ignore the total page count issue. There are really a lot of things to do about formatting and styling. You have really too many paragraphs stil in Default Paragraph Style (for example all your notes are such instead of Footnote and this makes no difference between notes and main discourse while, traditionally, notes are a bit smaller type). I also see the outdated obsolete North-American habit of double-space after punctuation which was legitimate during typewriter era but has been dropped (and it causes formatting glitches with modern document processors).
Ok, so it’s a bug then, just so long as it’s not some weird breakage on my part. Bugs happen.
notes are a bit smaller type
One of my first travails was trying to get the footnotes sorted. I had a footnote Style but it was bonkers so I just used Default. I’ve since got a footnote Style just inheriting (see, I’m learning 
normal style, but still logically a footnote. Yeah, the double space … that’s bolted onto my brain, it will take some time in a mental institution with heavy drugs to get that out of me.
As to the footnotes, I’m needing some advice: footnotes sorta make sense in paper-based thinking. But if this doc is mostly read on screen, ‘pages’ become physically redundant – more like HTML where you just scroll. The pages become only logical markers, sorta. I’m wondering about some alternative to the footnotes being ‘physically’ at the bottom of the page, is there some sort of ‘click on the footnote to see it’? Thing is that there’s so many of them and there’s this logical problem when the anchor is logically lower than the size of the footnote area so I’m forcing page breaks to get around that. Otherwise the footnotes span two pages which is inconvenient. It’s a PITA, and looks bad. But I guess ‘click to view’ doesn’t make sense because then how many pages is the doc? Anyway, if there’s a better way I’d be glad to hear it. Or maybe Writer has some mechanism for protecting a footnote automatically? Manual page breaks are obviously 2nd best.
LibreOffice 7.3.1.3 & 24.2.4.2 show the correct number, 142, of pages regardless of whether Show Whitespace is on or off.
Maybe you could make a bug report as suggested?
If I’m the guy to do it, sure. I’m not being lazy, but perhaps a more experienced hand would make a better report? Anyway nice to know that the bug is fairly recent.
I’m sorry, but if that is a bug. So what should be the difference between using the White Space option and not using it?
https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/swriter/01/show_whitespace.html
Well the page count shouldn’t change. As ajlittoz said, it’s just a convenience to give you a more compact view of your document.
And how can you condense the view without changing the pages? If you add more text to each page, the number of pages cannot remain the same.
Perhaps the only way would be to change the size of the pages, making them smaller.
But nothing is changed in the document, it’s simply a question of how it is presented on screen. You normally see an outline of the physical page including margins. With Whitespace off, you see only a fine line between pages and no margins.
You seem not to be familiar with the feature. It is only a display functionality. Vertical whitespace is suppressed on screen. Page break hints are kept. But page contents becomes faulty with page breaks becoming rather random: I saw a full page split into a series of “small pages” (in extreme cases, a “new” page containing only 3 lines). This split, without user action, is the bug.
BTW, speaking of page breaks, how come there’s no graphic to indicate that? I’m converting my footnotes (smaller font, as you suggest) and where I have a page break isn’t apparent except that the following paragraph has hatch marks in the Spotlight display. Oh, should I submit a bug report? Looks like this is well known anyway. But if you say so I’ll see if I can create a minimal example. But I suspect you will do a better job.
I can agree with that.
Sorry to break in on this, but I’m having the same problem in 26.2.0.3. With whitespace, my document is 563 pages, without it is variable, but I’ve seen as high as 984. You are right that suppressing whitespace is a convenience for the writer as it saves a lot of room and scrolling when editing. Also, when editing I sometimes have to re-check internal references, for instance if my text says to ‘see the chart on page whatever’, not having that chart on a page that can be counted upon is a great misfortune.
As for the double-space, I wonder why it is considered to be obsolete. It seems to me to be a smaller version of indenting paragraphs, that is, a help to the reader, and it just looks better. If it confuses modern document processors maybe that’s a thing, but, not being a coder, I can’t understand why it should.
Anyway, I would vote for fixing whatever it is that causes no-whitespace to be so hinkie.
Also, assuming that a document is destined for a digital publishing (such as Kindle) is there a way to create a linked footnote, to avoid the bottom-of-the-page physical location you mention in another comment?
ajlittoz has primed me on how to file a bug report. Let’s see if we can get any action on this. Some projects, the devs live in their own world and pay no attention to the mere users, other projects, user satisfaction is the whole show …
I have no idea why. The fact is this usage is no longer (very officially) recommended. And anyway it never adhered to typographical standards when these have a rule about post-punctuation spacing. Depending on country, this spacing is more or less wide and never equal two double-space. Don’t forget too that spaces are handled special when justification is enabled: the rendering engine can expand spaces to achieve justification. And this is where double spaces cause problems because they are not considered a a “single sequence” but each space is handled separately (and the result is not nice). As far as I understand Writer, devs have made absolutely no provision regarding double-spaces, hence the problem.
Double spaces could make sense in the mechanical typewriter era when you only had fixed constant pitch characters. But I have no certainty about it because usages were different in different countries (due to different typographical rules). Proportional fonts need more subtle tricks to request a change in space width. Unfortunately, the various spaces in the Unicode general punctuation block have not been assigned “expandable width” property and are taken with their raw font-defined width, which again won’t fit nicely in justification.
Last, HTML collapses all runs of spaces into a single space. To workaround this, I have seen a generator issuing a series of pairs space+nonbreaking space to fool browser rendering engines. But, once again, this is not ideal because the two categories of spaces have not the same base width.