Writer: Create section OUTSIDE previous section

[josemoya]

Hi!
When you create a section with Insert > Section…, the new section is linked to previous section, as you can see in Format > Section…

This means columns are not balanced, fill is inherited from previous version and a plethora of other undesired decisions.
Of course, you can avoid it by creating the sections from the beginning, i.e. writing out all your text and then making the sections, but this is not always possible.

Is there a way to “go outside previous section, then create a new one” or “unlink this section from previous section”?
Yours,
José

Version Details:
Version: 7.4.2.3 / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 40(Build:3)
CPU threads: 4; OS: Linux 5.15; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: es-ES (es_ES.UTF-8); UI: es-ES
Ubuntu package version: 1:7.4.2~rc3-0ubuntu0.20.04.1~lo1max1
Calc: threaded

[ajlittoz]

Please, ropen your question (press … then the “pencil” tool) to attach a sample file so that I can understand the structure of the formatted document.

When a section in inserted “in the middle” of another one, it breaks the outer section into two areas: one above and one below the new one.Each “area” is handled as an independent section, meaning their text is balanced “individually”. This may not be immediately visible because the section box model is “faulty” IMHO, or at leat not well defined or implemented.

A thoroug analysis of your sample document is preferable to free hypothesis.

[mikekaganski]

When you insert the first section, it makes sure that there is at least one paragraph outside of the section. This is obvious when you have section boundaries and formatting marks shown; but if you don’t enable these aids, you might have wrong idea how your document is organized.

If you remove paragraph(s) in the end, and now you don’t have paragraphs outside of your section, then of course, the sections that you create while being inside the first sections are logically nested (not “linked”). Their properties are independent, though - as @ajlittoz mentioned.

To create a section after the current one, you need first to exit the current section. As with tables, to do that, you go to the very end of the section, and then press Alt+Enter. See help.

[josemoya]

Ok, thanks.
A reference to this shortcut “Alt+Enter” in the help page for “section” would be nice, since libreOffice Writer has no Insert> Break > Section break in the menu, like M$ Word has.

Having to search for functions in a shortcut list is not very intuitive.

Yours,
José

[ajlittoz]

@josemoya

libreOffice Writer has no Insert> Break > Section break in the menu, like M$ Word has.

A break is any kind of disruption in your text flow. A section in Writer is simply an area with a different layout within a page. A section causes no break in the text flow. The sub-areas resulting from the presence of a section are continuous, and text flows the same across these sub-areas as they do across pages. There is no concept like a section break. What would be its semantic? You only have “navigation” functions.

A Word section is something different, akin to (rather a sub-area) page styles in Writer. Therefore, a Word section break is similar to a Writer page break.

Alt+Enter may seem to behave like a “section break” but contrary to page break, it is not kept in the document encoding, meaning you can’t remove it once it is used (and it is pointless because it is not kept) and you can freely add text inside the section as if it never existed.

It is the same function as the one intended to “escape” from a table.

[LeroyG]

@mikekaganski

To create a section after the current one, you need first to exit the current section. As with tables, to do that, you go to the very end of the section, and then press Alt+Enter.

And the same for before. But you need to go to the very start of the section.