Typesetting agony: section breaks, footers, and headers, oh MY...

[thesun]

I have struggled and struggled for nearly two weeks trying to do this and am frustrated with how opaque and confusing this is. Can someone tell me the steps I need to do to set up page styles (if possible) so that I can properly typeset a document?



I have one type of page that's simply "Day One" (or "Day Two" etc.) centered in the middle of the page, with no header or footer. That has to be an odd page, and it's followed by a blank even page.

Then there's "Chapter One" (or "Chapter Two," etc.) which have 10 lines of space, then "Chapter XYZ," another ten lines, and the starting paragraphs. These first chapter pages need no header, but have to have a center-justified page number in the footer.

Then there's Even, Odd "regular" pages that have a header and footer that's justified so that the Even pages have left justification and the Odd pages have right justification. For the Even pages, the header needs "Author" in the upper left, and the page number in the far lower left. For the Odd pages, the header needs "Title" in the upper left and the page number in the far lower left.

I've gotten as far as creating some section breaks but it's hard to know which ones I need to make this happen. Are those three different sections?

And ideally, once I set it up for the Days page, for example, I'd like to be able to APPLY this same look and feel to other places in the book, rather than have to go to each one and recreate it all from scratch.

My thought is if I could apply the last type through the whole book first, then adjust just the Days and Chapter pages...

Sorry to put all this out there but I've just been so frustrated and demoralized. I even tried this in OpenOffice and it seems much easier but I don't have the fonts that I want there. So I'd really love to get it working right in Word. If anyone has done this kind of thing and knows the right process it would be fantastic. I seem to do one thing and then suddenly all the headers have disappeared, or I apply a style and it adds a page that I didn't want into the document and then all the Odd pages are even and the Even pages odd...

A huge thank you to anyone out there who can help me with this. THANK YOU!!!!

[Ulodesk]

Dear agonized,
I know the feeling. While it is ultimately possible to do most of what you want, I think it needs to be said that this kind of page layout task is far more simply accomplished in an application designed for page layout, which Word is not. The Rolls-Royce is InDesign, of course, but that's pricey and has a significant learning curve. There are offerings from many others, from free to very modestly priced, and you might wish to have a look.

If not, the first order of business is to stop working on your immediate task, take a breath, and get some instruction from the sources of your choice on the principles by which sections and section breaks work. These are, ultimately, what control odd and even page numberings, headers and footers, margins, and other relevant features of your design. You might wish to create a simple dummy document in which to experiment as you read, rather than having the frustration of seeing your masterpiece getting discombobulated continually.

Grasping the operant principles will save you time and energy. Sometimes, we have to slow down to gain speed.

[thesun]

Thank you very much for the reply! Yes, I totally agree. There ARE better tools, and maybe I should just opt for them but I don't feel like what I'm doing is particularly complex. (Is it?) So I'm hopeful of figuring it out.

About documentation...do you have any good suggestions? I have read (and even bought!) several books on typesetting in Word, and have looked at a number of web pages and have enough of a sense of it to think that I SHOULD know what they're doing...but obviously that's not the case.

Part of it is not knowing the right terminology for searching, too.

Do you know if I make a test document (I'm working with a Save As version, so I'm not concerned about messing up my real one) can I save it somehow and use it as a template for the real one? Or do I just learn the steps and such with it, then chuck it and do everything over again?

Thank you for the suggestions! Ideally, I'll have some replies with more info/answers, too...but...this is a start! :-)

[Ulodesk]

One needs to use the term "template" with caution in Word; Word has documents and templates -- different animals. You can save a document as a template (.dotx). When you double-click to open a template, a new document opens and will need to be named, but your template will remain untouched. To change a template itself, you need to right-click it and select Open.

[Stefan Blom]

To force text to start on an odd page, insert an odd page section break (and similarly for even page).

For everything on headers and footers, see http://wordfaqs.mvps.org/HeaderFooter.htm. Also have a look at http://wordfaqs.mvps.org/FrontMatterRibbon.htm.

[thesun]

This info is very helpful. I appreciate it.

[Stefan Blom]

You are welcome.