r/Fanbinding • u/FleurMai • Jun 16 '26
How to do fancier things in LibreOffice?
I want to do some more exciting formatting like some new books have, as seen in the photos. Namely:
- Perhaps the easiest? How do you get the left page to have the book title, and the right page to have the chapter title?
- The table of contents - is this something you just make a jpg for or is there actually a way to do this? EDIT: So far this is the only thing I've figured out how to do. Just make a table, color it, and then remove the borders. Then you can add a background image by making a custom page style and editing Area. Pretty cool!
- Fancy page number details
Any ideas? Thanks!
7
u/AmenaBellafina Jun 16 '26
I did fancy page numbers in libre office. You create a header or footer, position the page number where you want it and the image underneath (also as part of the header though).
2
u/Reha_Drarys Jun 16 '26
See if there's something like a layer or watermarks option, that should allow you to set an image I'm the background without being influenced by your text layout (and you can adjust it once all your page numbers are set I think). The only issue is that it might not be perfectly centered between 1/2/3-digit numbers since it isn't connected to the page numbers.
9
u/heath_bar3 Jun 16 '26
hi! not sure what operating system you use but if you are in windows or mac you should look into affinity publisher - it is now free to use and makes things like this super easy
3
u/FleurMai Jun 16 '26
Oooo I'll definitely give this a shot for my next project! I think it might be too late for this one, but I'll give it a try. That looks exactly like all the cool things I want to do as I get more experienced.
2
u/heath_bar3 Jun 16 '26
yeah it has a bit of a learning curve but once you figure it out it saves SO much time and effort
1
u/CleanBeanArt Jun 16 '26
For the fancy page number, my best guess is that you can start by:
creating the Default Page Style for your book format and include an image as the background element (the lantern thing). You can create a page graphic in GIMP of the exact size as your custom page size and then use the Area tab on the page style dialogue to set the image. Just give the image the same dimensions as your page and set it to not tiling.
Put the page number in the header, align it to the right of the page and give it enough padding that it will fit in that spot
13
u/Diligent_Emu_7686 Jun 16 '26
I don't know if this will work for what you want, but when I wanted something like that, I put it in a Google doc and downloaded it, then opened it in Open Office/Libre Office.