Bug 81814

Expected behaviour: Libre Office Writer provides page styles for left and right pages. I assume that by con­vention left pages are even numbered pages and right pages are odd numbered. Therefore Writer should in­sert an empty page if a page with a left style follows an even numbered page or if a page with a right style follows an odd numbered page. Otherwise the pages appear on the wrong side of the printed copy, especially if a duplex printer is used.

Current behaviour: When using left and right page styles the page correctly reflects the fact that there are the required additional pages. The page preview does not show the additional page, and the pages do not appear in the printed copy. Therefore the pages appear at the wrong side.

How to reproduce:
The attachted document is designed to show the effect. Open it and move the cursor through the document. The footer line of Libre Office Writer should display the page number that is written at the top of the page containing the cursor.

Now open the Page Preview either using “File->Page Preview (CTRL + Shift + O)” or by pressing the short­cut. Page Preview displays 4 pages only. According to the page numbering there should be six.

Print the document: Only four pages are printed. If you use a duplex printer the page 3 is at a left page, and page 4 is on a right page despite the fact that they use the opposite page style.

Observed with Windows 7 and Libre Office Version: 4.2.5.2, Build ID: 61cb170a04b­b1f12e77c884eab9192be736ec5f5

Note: Is was only after I designed this example that I detected that there is a switch that controls the genera­tion of the blank pages (File -> Print -> Libre Office Writer -> Print automatically generated pages or File -> Printer Settings -> Options -> Print automatically inserted blank pages). When this switch is on, Libre Office works as expected. The problem therefore is that this switch is hard to find. When I used Page Preview to check the appearance on the printer I could not find a hint that this switch exists (and happened to be in the wrong state) and therefore classified the observed be­haviour as a bug. I think the Page Preview would be more useful if its toolbar would contain a few additional widgets to control what you see in the Page Pre­view. These widgets should allow to change settings relevant for the appearance of the printed copy.

- Icons corresponding roughly to the “Properties...” and “Options...” buttons in the dialog “File -> Printer Settings...”. Using these icons it would be possible to check the effects of different settings without actually printing the document. These settings are already available using the “print docu­ment” button left of the “close preview” button. Changes to these settings affect the printed copy only and they allow you to print something quite different from what you saw in the preview – I think that is not what is usually intended.

- If Print Preview is configured to show two pages side by side, there are two conflicting ways to do so, and both ways may be useful. Therefore there should be a control that allows to select between two different modes:

a) Show together what goes to one sheet of paper (front and back sides). This is the way Page Pre­view works now. Unfortunately this implies that right sides are displayed left and left sides are dis­played on the right. Therefore there should be another mode:

b) Show pages on the correct side: right sides on the right and left sides on the left. This means that you will see the contents of different sheets of paper side by side.