Using the zoom to view 2+ pages in the editable view, in OpenOffice.org Writer 3.0

Here's another nice new 3.0 feature. You can view pages side-by-side in editable mode, up to three.

Here's a normal page.

 

Here are the controls, in the lower right corner, for viewing side by side and zooming. The icons are Single, Double, and Double-with-first-page-on-right-side (more on that later).

You can drag the little slider bubble in the middle and drag it from right to left and back to control magnification. The vertical lines indicate how far you have to be for one, two, and three pages at time.

And the 100% zoom is the regular approach to zoom; right-click on it or double-click it to get different magnification choices.

 

Here's what you get. Please click each image to see it bigger. When you have the icons set this way, with the single icon showing, the little slider dot to the right of the second line, and magnification at 100%, you only have room to see one page at a time, and even if it were smaller, it would only show one at a time.

 

I click the Double Page icon and I drag the little slider dot to the left.  It gets smaller but that's all. That's because the slider dot is still to the right of the first vertical line.

 

Now I drag the slider dot to the left of the first vertical line. The Double Page icon is also still marked, and I get two pages side by side. This is in the low 60% for zoom.

 

Now see what I get when I drag the slider dot to the left of the second vertical line. There are three pages displayed across.

 

Now when I click the Double-Pages-But-With-The-First-Page-On-The-Right, the right-hand of the three icons, and drag the slider back a little, we get this. This view is great for book production, when the first page, an odd page, is always on the right side. (Take a look at any printed book and you'll see the odd pages are on the right.)

 

Comments

[Tim Munro]

Quite by accident I discovered a side effect of using the zoom slider. When opening a form in Base, the size of the form on the screen depends on where the slider was last set when viewing a normal Writer text document.

Since the slider isn't available on the form view, I must remember to reset the slider to 100% before closing a text document.

The report view in Base seems unaffected.

Tim