Hi
I wonder if anyone can help me solve the page number problem in Libre Office. Page numbering can never be automatic. If I start a document and set page number, if you edit the document, it ALWAYS screw up the page numbers. It will start again at page 0 or 1 by itself. Its such a pain to have to manually go into Format\Paragraph and then select "Breaks : Insert: With Page Style and manually manipulate the page number that ought to be showing. It won't let you do anything if the document happens to contain tables. If you select Type\Column, you cannot adjust the page number at all.

For that reason, I had no choice but to take up the free Microsoft Office student licence offered through my uni. I literally just managed to submit assignments at the cut off time because I had to try fixing up the faulty page numbering which in the end I had to abandon because as I said, with tables thrown in, it was impossible.

I wonder if anyone else experience similar problem and would really appreciate any help.

Thanks in advance

I have not encountered this, but I seldom work with documents longer than 10 or 12 pages these days. My days of working with 300-page documents are in the past.

Could you provide more precise details and perhaps some examples as to the circumstances under which this occurs and the types of edits you are doing at the time?

Let's assume you want to place your page numbers centred in the footer of each page. Do that as usual.
1. Place your cursor in the centre of the footer of the first page.
2. Insert-->Fields-->Page Number
Ok now you have page numbers starting from page 1. If you want them to start from, say page 5, do the following steps after having set up your page numbers as shown above.
1. Click anywhere on the 1st paragraph of your first page.
2. Format-->Paragraph-->Click on the "Text Flow" tab.
3. Click on the "Breaks" box in the Text Flow menu.
4. Click on the "With page style" box.
5. You can now set the starting page to the number of your choice.

Your document should now be formatted to the page numbers you want. Editing the document (inserting, deleting, etc.) should have no undesired effects on your numbering.

I am using LibreOffice Version: 5.0.2.2.
jdk

You say "It will start again at page 0 or 1 by itself" but you don't mention whether this happens in the middle of the document or not, so here's some info that MIGHT be applicable to your problem.

With longer documents (and I don't know what that number is precisely; I first discovered it while writing a 300+ page book, but later noticed it on documents with as few as 60 pages or so), there is a *long standing bug* in Writer that will cause the page numbers to change - usually restarting as you said - but from somewhere in the middle of the document: in other words, the page numbers that used to go from 1-100 change to being 1-48 followed by 1-52 or something like that. This happens after editing for some period of time and, as near as I could ever figure out, has nothing to do with available RAM or disk space. Once this occurs, though, the incorrect page numbers are shown not only on the screen and in the table of contents, but on printouts and pdf exports.

IF the change occurs in this manner, however, there is a solution. Save the document (yes, really, even with the incorrect page numbers), then close and reopen it, and all will be well. But, as you say, this becomes quite annoying; constantly checking page numbers before printing is not something we typically think of doing.

This bug has been around at least since the late 3.x versions and still occurs in the most recent 5.x releases. LibreOffice Writer is a terrific word processor (particularly for the price!), but this bug and the very buggy handling of multiple languages/scripts within a single document also made me drop it for serious use, although I still use it for most other things.

Like your document, mine also had many tables, but I never associated tables themselves with the issue, but you could be on to something. So - the bottom line is that you can prepare long documents for publication/printing/presentation or whatever with Writer: just make sure to close and reload the document before doing so to insure the page numbers are back to normal.

Since LO was forked from OO 3.3, does the bug occur in OpenOffice? I prefer OO, but the only documents of any size I have use separate files for the chapters, so I wouldn't see the problem. As for multiple scripts in a page, I don't have problems with multiple scripts from plane 0, although it can be temperamental with plane 1.

If memory serves, I believe the first time I noticed the magic page number changing issue was with the 3.6 release - about the time I dumped Windows for Linux.

I never used the Open Office incarnation, so can't comment on that.

Speaking of separate files for chapters, I tried that early on, but found too many glitches (perhaps my misunderstanding of how it was supposed to work) to deal with at the time, and haven't ever tried it again. I guess if it were a collaborative document I'd give it another shot, but don't expect to do that.