What is Writer?

What Is Writer?

Writer is the word processor component of Apache OpenOffice. In addition to the usual features of a word processor (spelling check, thesaurus, hyphenation, autocorrect, find and replace, automatic generation of tables of contents and indexes, mail merge and others), Writer provides these important features:

• Templates and styles (see Chapter 2)
• Page layout methods, including frames, columns, and tables
• Embedding or linking of graphics, spreadsheets, and other objects
• Built-in drawing tools
• Master documents to group a collection of documents into a single document
• Change tracking during revisions
• Database integration, including a bibliography database
• Export to PDF, including bookmarks (see Chapter 9)
• And many more

These features are covered in detail in the Writer Guide.

Numbering Pages

To automatically number pages:

1. Insert a header or footer, as described in “Creating Headers and Footers” .
2. Place the cursor in the header or footer where you want the page number to appear and choose Insert → Fields → Page Number.

Including the Total Number of Pages

To include the total number of pages (as in “page 1 of 12”):

1. Type the word “page” and a space, then insert the page number as above.
2. Press the space bar once, type the word “of” and a space, then choose Insert → Fields → Page Count.

The Page Count field inserts the total number of pages in the document, as shown on the Statistics tab of the document's Properties window (File → Properties). If you restart page numbering anywhere in the document, then the total page count may not be what you want. See Chapter 4 (Formatting Pages) in the Writer Guide for more information.

Restarting Page Numbering

Often you will want to restart the page numbering at 1, for example on the page following a title page or a table of contents. In addition, many documents have the “front matter” (such as the table of contents) numbered with Roman numerals and the main body of the document numbered in Arabic numerals, starting with 1.

You can restart page numbering in two ways.

Method 1:

1. Place the cursor in the first paragraph of the new page.
2. Choose Format → Paragraph.
3. On the Text Flow tab of the Paragraph dialog, select Breaks.
4. Select Insert and then With Page Style and specify the page style to use.
5. Specify the page number to start from, and then click  OK .

Method 1 is also useful for numbering the first page of a document with a page number greater than 1. For example, you may be writing a book, with each chapter in a separate file. Chapter 1 may start with page 1, but Chapter 2 could begin with page 25 and Chapter 3 with page 51.

Method 2:

1. Insert → Manual Break.
2. By default, Page break is selected on the Insert Break dialog (Figure 56).
3. Choose the required page Style.
4. Select Change page number.
5. Specify the page number to start from, and then click  OK .

Figure 56: Restarting page numbering after a manual page break