Overview

Writer's master document feature is a lot closer to FrameMaker than to Word. We like it a lot, and think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

If you're creating long documents, you're likely to want to use elements like cross-references, running heads, tables of contents, indexes, and other lists, like lists of figures. Writer has some decent tools for doing all this. If your long documents are getting a little too long and difficult to manage, Writer has a master document feature that lets you group multiple files into a single book, where you can create a single table of contents, an index (and other lists), create cross-references between book files, and use continuous page numbering. In this chapter, the terms book and master document are synonymous.

Creating a master document means you'll need to stretch your mental muscles and apply your existing knowledge of Writer styles (see Power Formatting With Styles on page 247) and headers and footers (see Using Headers and Footers on page 282). This knowledge is particularly useful when it comes to troubleshooting your master documents.

This chapter shows you first how to create and maintain a master document, then how to perform tasks that are common to long documents and books.

Note

When working with long documents, you might want to keep file size to a minimum. In that case, when you insert graphics, select the Link option. This puts an image of a graphic in the document without inserting the entire graphic file. The drawback to this is that Writer always has to know where those graphic files are. So when you send or move the files, you must also send or set new links to the graphics files.