How to give different headers to different pages in LibreOffice

Following my previous adventures with LibreOffice, I wanted to place chapter names in headers, which means different pages would have different headers… which doesn’t seem to have an obvious solution, since the way headers (and footers) usually work is “same stuff for every page” (even though this can mean same automatic field with a different value on every page).

Anyway, LibreOffice provides a way to set different headers via page styles. The “Style and Formatting” dialog (accessible via F11), which you probably already use to format text at the character or paragraph level, also contains a “Page Styles” part. When you edit page styles, you can set specific headers, but also footers, margins, and even paper format.

The way I worked was to create one chapter per file, then combine all files manually. In each file, I defined a chapter-specific page style (like you would define any other style), which I then imported into the merged file (in the “Style and Formatting” dialog, top-right menu button them “Load styles” and import from file – don’t forget to check “Pages”), before copy/pasting the content. I’m not sure if there’s a better way or not, but to switch between different page styles in the global document, I used page breaks (Insert → Manual break), where you can specify the page style to be used after the break (default value being “[none]”).

Useful information on the LibreOffice wiki too: Defining Different Headers and Footers