So you’re formatting your novel in LibreOffice and have run into a huge issue. Your document has about 10 pages of front matter, and no matter what you do, you can’t get the second page of the first chapter to show as “page 2.”
Plus, maybe you’ve searched and found outdated forums that don’t really explain what’s going on, and Youtube was equally unhelpful unless you wanted to watch a bunch of videos.
No worries! I got you covered…after I ran into the same problem and spent a lot of time searching and tinkering until I figured it out.
1- Finish your project, first.
LibreOffice requires you to change the “style” of your pages if you want to tinker with page numbers. But if you’re adding or subtracting pages here and there, you’re going to have to go back and tinker with these. It’s a bit annoying. So make sure your page numbering is the last thing you work on.
2- Open Styles tab (right side)
View -> Styles (F11). This should open a tab on the right. From here, scroll over the icons until you see the one called “Page Styles.” Click on that.
3 – Set up Styles
So for this tutorial, you’re going to use two styles that are already there, and make two new ones..The two default styles are:
- First Page
- Default Page Style
And you need to create two new ones by right clicking “default page style” and clicking “new.” Name one something like “front matter” (this is for those roman numeral page numbers at the front). And name the second “chapter starts” (for the no-number start to a chapter).
When creating the first one: on the Organizer tab’s “next style,” leave it as the same (frontmatter). Hit okay and it should be added to your page styles list.
When creating the second one: on the Organizer’s tab’s “next style,” select “default page style” from the dropdown menu.
Then what you need to do for ALL FOUR of these styles is right click on them, and go to “modify.”
Once the modification window pops up, there are a few things you need to do. On all four, you want to go to the tab that says “page” and then:
- set your page size (ex, book size – 5 x 8, or 6 x 9, etc)
- set up your margins. If you do not do this across the 4 styles, then it will change your document and look majorly messed up. Check with your publishing platform or genre standards as to minimum margin sizes
- under layout settings (see screenshot above), select “mirrored” in the drop down menu beside “Page Layout.” This is going to format your gutters properly.
For the DEFAULT PAGE STYLE and FRONT MATTER styles only:
- Under the “header” or “footer” tab (depending on where you want to place page numbers), turn it ON. ——–MAKE SURE IT IS TURNED OFF FOR THE “FIRST PAGE” and “CHAPTER START” STYLEs.
For YOUR CUSTOM FRONT MATTER page style only:
- On the “page” tab, change your numbering style to what you desire (roman numbers, abc, etc).
4- Navigate to Document Page 2
Once you are physically looking at this page, double click your front matter style to assign it this style. Then click into the header space which should have activated thanks to the style, and from the top menu go to insert -> page number, and it should insert the roman numerals (or whatever you selected to display). It should format your gutters properly because you selected mirrored.
5- Scroll to the End of your Front Matter
Place your cursor after the last bit of text on the last page of your front matter. Then from the top bar options, select “insert,” then “more breaks” and then “manual break.”
Once that small popup comes up, you want to select “Page break.” It won’t let you select this unless you have your cursor in the regular text area (aka not header or footer) of the last page of your front matter. Then for page style, select “chapter start” from the dropdown menu (ignore the “left page” in the screenshot). Finally, click the box for “start page number at” and select 1.
6- Repeat Step 5 for Every Chapter
Instead of scrolling to the end of your front matter, scroll to the end of your chapters. Do another manual break, and set it to “chapter start.” DO NOT SELECT CHANGE PAGE NUMBER THIS TIME. Because your style setup for “chapter start” jumps to “default” after, it should continue with your pages. If there is no number after the first chapter page, just click into the header and insert page number (LibreOffice can be quirky sometimes).
LAST- Navigate to the title page
Once you’re physically looking at the first page of your document (which should be a title page), double click on the “first page” style to assign it to the title page. You should notice that no header will show. I put this last because sometimes when you’re assigning the other page styles, it will change this one, too. It’s just easier to do it last rather than add a million page breaks everywhere.
Pssst. I also wrote about this over on Medium a few weeks ago. And I think I wrote about another method there assuming you don’t want page numbers on your front matter. I won’t say it’s easier, because page numbers are NOT easy in LibreOffice, but…it worked for me when I re-formatted The Last Calico Cat.