Writer/page styles
A page is a strange thing in Writer – technically spoken. A document consists of paragraphs containing text, objects, tables etc.. But there is nothing like a page. Pages are created when the document is layouted for a page oriented device, e.g. a printer. The exact page where a particular part of the document appears is not fixed and depends on other parts of the document. If there is nothing like a page object in the document itself and in its representation in the file format as well it is not surprising that OOo Writer doesn't have “page properties”. You can't have properties for something that doesn't exist.
Nevertheless users have the idea of page properties, e.g. size and width, margins etc. From Writer's POV these properties make up an “instruction set” for the creation of pages that happens in the document layout and this instruction set is what we call page styles. Users that understand and like the power of styles in Writer are able to understand what page styles are. And once they see and understand that there are no “hard attributes” for pages (as pages exist only virtually) they get used to work with page styles when they want to change “page properties”. Even users that usually don't use styles can become trained to change the “page properties” at the right place in Writer: “Format – Page”. The problems start if they want to have some pages to look different than others, e.g. they want to add header or footer starting from page 3.
A Web browser like the one you are using to read this blog doesn't offer this feature. If you print out a web page you can setup a common page layout for all pages, that's it. The location “File-Page Layout” looks natural for this task. It looks strange to have the same menu entry in a word processor – it fosters the impression that there is something like “the” page layout of the document (common to all pages) and you can switch on a header or footer separately – in a way like a “page property”. So people look for “Insert footer” in Writer but when they select the menu item they see names of page styles listed there. That's where the confusion starts. If the user wanted to switch on the footer for all pages she could achieve her goal by just clicking on the only entry available – but usually she is lost if she wanted the footer only on a few pages.
The Writer concept of page styles is great but to work with it you must do many things explicitly – as here: if you want to have your footer starting on page 3 you must create an additional page style, insert a page break and specify the page style you want to use for the page after the break and then call “Insert footer” for the new page style. That's a lot of work to do and to understand. Why couldn't Writer do it automatically? The only things Writer needed to know would be for which pages the footer should be inserted – everything else could be done behind the scenes. So the logical idea is to have some options for “Insert Footer”, e.g.
- all pages - only pages with style “xyz” - starting with current page - this page only
