Inserting manual page break eliminates all header text

[suntelia]

Hi all,

I am finalizing a book for publishing and need to insert one last manual break in order for the document to be up to publishing standards. The break (just a simple blank page) needs to occur directly before the first chapter page; However, when I insert the manual break, all of the following header text (which contain the page numbers and titles for 300+ pages) are eliminated. (The headers still exist, but the text itself disappears.) What can I do to keep this from occurring? Each page is set to its own individual style format, and the headers were applied to each page and then numbered manually. Any helpful suggestions would be appreciated!

On a time crunch and growing frustrated,
~ SVNTELIA

[RoryOF]

Working on a copy of your good file, why not forget about inserting the Page break before Chapter 1; instead, add blank lines after the text on the existing last page before Chapter 1 until it forces a new page?

That might save the situation, although it is not ideal.

[suntelia]

Hey that is a great suggestion - unfortunately I have tried this and it still has the same outcome! I did however just figure out that by checking the "same content left/right" box, the header text reappears but only for one side of the document! I am going page by page and checking this box, but the text reappears only on the left side of the document. It is strange - especially because the pages are not linked in any way, considering they are each set to a different page style.

[RoryOF]

For your next project you will find it of great help to master the use of Styles.

This document will be informative:
Writer for students (several languages)

This document covers much the same ground as the previous document. It will be helpful for those writing a book
http://documentation.openoffice.org/whitepapers/Creating_large_documents_with_OOo.odt

[suntelia]

Thank you, that was so helpful. I'll read over them. May or may not help with my current issue but at least I will know for future projects. As of right now I'm just manually adjusting everything.

[RoryOF]

Is it possible that all of your page styles are based on Right pages, and their following style is another custom style also based on right pages. If so, you need to reconsider your page styles - typically a Right page should be followed by a Left, or by Default. Normally it is not necessary to define many page styles; if the change in page style is merely a different header - typically Document Name on the left header, Chapter Name on the right header, with perhaps a section number and page number, this can easily be done using Fields. I'm just now looking at a Writer file for a complete book (750 page); and it uses only five page styles.

Going offline now.

[Bill]

Please upload a sample document. The description of what happens should only occur if multiple pages have the same page style. If each page has a different page style, then adding or removing page breaks should have no affect on the headers of any other page. Also checking or unchecking the "same content left/right" should do nothing since it only allows putting different content in the left and right headers of pages with the same page style.

[jrkrideau]

The forum has a maximum file size of 128k. If your example is larger you will need to upload to a file hosting site such as
Dropbox or MediaFire and post the download link here.

[John_Ha]

We just need a few pages before and after the problem location.

You can obscure the contents without affecting the structure too much (lines will spill differently because different characters have different widths) by changing every lowercase alphabetic character to an " x " with

Edit > Find and Replace
Find box [a-z]
Replace box x
Options: Match case: YES, Regular expressions: YES
click Replace all

Repeat the above using [A-Z] and X to scramble the upper case letters, and [0-9] and 0 to scramble numeric data.