I was recently trying to clean up a template for printed books that was originally created in LibreOffice, saved in the .docx format. A HUGE problem with LibreOffice and OpenOffice is that it's virtually impossible in both of their Writer modules to properly format headers for books. The issue is that the first page of each chapter should NOT have a header, and subsequent pages within each chapter typically have a different header on the left and right (even and odd) pages. It gets more complicated with non-fiction, where one of the headers is the chapter title, so one header has to change with each chapter but the other header does not change.
In Microsoft Word, there is a feature that allows the headers and footers in a new chapter (section) to be linked to the headers and footers in the preceding section. This is very convenient when formatting a book for print, because if the title changes (for example), you only have to change the odd-page header at Chapter 1 and the change is automatically propagated through the entire body of the book.
Initially, I began to wonder if TextMaker offers this feature. My experiments suggest that it does not. If I am correct, I would like to request that this feature be added ASAP. TextMaker already offers Book View (which Word does not offer, but LibreOffice does), so adding this functionality would be a great service to self-published authors.
However, my investigations into this feature revealed another problem, and in my opinion it's a big one. VERY big. TextMaker doesn't respect Word's formatting of headers and footers with respect to this format auto-propagation feature. The following is a screen shot of three sample pages from the template after it had been cleaned up and made functional in Word:
Here's the same file after it had been opened in TextMaker, saved without making any edits, and then opened again in Word:
Note the header and footer links at the right side of each page. TextMaker removed the header and footer links, thereby destroying the functionality of Word's header/footer linking system. That's a real problem. I can't accept files from clients and return the files with their inherent functionality compromised. If you can't fix this, it means I can't fully transition from Word to Textmaker -- I will have to continue using Word in order to ensure that I don't mess up my client's files.
