Years ago, Elizabeth Mathias, an employee of Sun Microsystems, told me a story about StarOffice, the proprietary program that became OpenOffice.org, and later LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice. According to Mathias, when the Writer module was first developed several decades ago, its programmers were told they would have to use it to document their work. As a result, they made sure that Writer was not simply a word processor, but a layout program as well – to the benefit of free software users ever since. In fact, although not complete, Writer's features are advanced enough that it should hardly be considered a word processor at all.

Admittedly, the features of Writer often go unnoticed. If you format manually, you might be completely unaware of them. Even if you use styles, you might not have noticed them fully. For most purposes, the average user hardly cares about the length of the line that separates the main body of text and a footnote or the spacing between a bullet and a list item. Most of the time, you can trust the code to have a default that is, if not perfect, at least good enough for your purposes.

However, if you want to enhance your document, the tools are waiting. Take, for example, the tools for setting up a header in a page style (Figure 1). Once a header is turned on, you can simply select Same content left/right and Same content on first page, and your header is set up.

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