What is the best way to format book pages?

[Dawna_R]

I want to create a book of short personal narratives which I hope to format so each story follows the other on the pages as you can see in the image seen here. (Spacing should be accurate and regular, but my image doesn’t indicate that.)

The image isn’t properly proportioned, but gives a basic idea what I’m aiming for. The stories actually are of different lengths than the ones in the image, and there are many more of them, but the main thing I’d like is to just somehow be able to type the stories in sequence with consistent line spacing, typefaces and their sizes the same for the text and the same for the story titles. The horizontal bar at the bottom of the pages are footers which will have page numbering.

Can anyone advise me how to best do this? I know a little about page, paragraph and line spacing format. I wonder about templates and if they relate to the question.

Any help will be much appreciated.

[ajlittoz]

It is matter of judicious use of paragraph styles.

I suggest two of the built-in ones:

• Heading 1 for the story title
• Body Text for the story itself

Of course, as they come out of the box, they do not exhibit the desired properties. You must customise them.

You are encouraged to download and read the Writer Guide to learn how to do it (available here).

[Dawna_R]

Wow! Great book of information. Thank you for the link. I’ve used Lbre Office for quite awhuile using mostly intution, but it’s time to really put some effort into learning how it works. I tend to put things off.

[LibreHorace]

Wow! Wow! Just like Dawna. I’ve used LO, a lot. But when I finally got down to doing a book, I found out my superficial ad hoc knowledge was not up to it. (However, I’ll add that in the very best products, when a user does something “reasonable,” it just works like they imagined it would, without having to look up a secret handshake.)
Notwithstanding, even as I use LO, and find all those impressive capabilities, I continue to marvel that people actually thought they could DO this. And did… Thank you for the link! (And thanks LO coders.)