More About Page Styles

So we need to set up some page styles. When you create an empty document in Libre Office it gives you the following page styles:

Default
Endnote
Envelope
First Page
Footnote
HTML
Index
Landscape
Left Page
Right Page

Default is what you will use for most pages in your book. It will have the following features:

A page header, possibly containing the title of the book on the left hand pages and the current chapter name and number on the right hand pages. Both will be centered, in the same font as the body text, and in italics. (There are other possibilities of course, but that's what I use).

A page footer, most likely with the page number, centered, same font as body text, no decoration. It is possible to put more stuff here, like "Page 1 of 250" and the revision date, but for a self published book you probably would not. If you're writing the sort of book that has pages with the words, "This page is intentionally blank" on them you can consider putting more stuff than a page number in the footer.

The page number will be in Arabic numerals (1,2,3, etc.) If you're ghost writing a book for Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck try to keep him from finding out they're called that, and why.

Mirrored pages. In other words, the fat margin is always the inner margin in the printed book.

Note that while there are styles for Left Pages and Right Pages we won't use them and I'm not even sure what they're doing. You just set your Default page style to Mirrored and it will take care of the rest.

This takes care of most of your pages. What other pages styles might you need?

You need a style for the Title Page and Verso. The Verso is the back side of the title page. It will have copyright information, ISBN numbers (possibly) and any disclaimers (this book is a work of fiction...). For this page you want it Mirrored with NO header and NO footer.

You can define a new page style for this, but I tend to use Index for this purpose since my books generally don't have an index. Defining a new page style is no big deal though.

Front Matter. If your book has a Table of Contents, or a preface or introduction you'll probably want a page style for this. It will look much like the Default, but it will have page numbering in lower case Roman numerals (i, ii, iii, iv, etc.).

First Page. This generally means the first page of a new chapter. These pages generally do not have page headings, otherwise they are similar to the Default.

So set up these styles using the instructions that came with your word processor.

Now that we've mentioned page numbering a couple of times you may be wondering how you get page numbering to start with page 1 on the first page rather than starting on the title page. You're probably also wondering how you get the front matter page numbering working. The answer is with Paragraph Styles, NOT page styles.

In Libre Office you can set up a Paragraph Style for Heading 1. On the Tab called Text Flow you'll see a section called "Breaks". In this section you'll tell Libre Office that every time somebody sets a paragraph to the Heading 1 style you want to do a page break before the paragraph and use a Page Style of First Page with a Page Number of 0. Doing this, then setting your chapter titles to this style, will start all of your chapters on a new page and the pages won't have headings.

While you're defining this Paragraph Style use the "Indents And Spacing" tab to indent the text 1" above the paragraph. That way your chapter headings will start 1" below the top of the page.

However, the page numbers will still be wrong. When we set Page Number of 0 above that tells the word processor to continue numbering the pages as they have been numbered. We cannot set the Page Number to 1 in the Style, otherwise every chapter in the book will restart numbering at page 1. For this we need to select the actual chapter title for the first chapter and set the paragraph format, not the style, so that only that particular paragraph resets the page numbering to 1.

You might look at the Default paragraph style too. One thing you might be tempted to do is to set the Alignment to Justified. This is where both the left and right margins are a straight line and the spacing between words is adjusted to make that happen. You see that in a lot of published books, possibly MOST of them, but it makes the book harder to read. Try it if you want to.

There are no styles for title pages. Generally you want to use the same font for the title on the title page that you used on the cover, but without the benefit of a drop shadow. Generally everything on the title page is centered. Title pages and chapter headings are the place for fancy fonts, so use 'em if you got 'em.

For the body text you'll want a serif font. Times New Roman for most, Liberation serif for us Linux users. 12 points is a good size for easy reading.

Next time we'll discuss making covers for Create Space books. Stay tuned.