(One of the awards for being a semifinalist is being able to receive a free proof copy of your novel from Amazon’s CreateSpace self-publishing service.)

For this complex formatting task, I used OpenOffice 2.4.  I know, I know – v3 came out this week, but I generally have a policy against downloading new software for the first 30 days after its release.  I like to make sure that any grievous bugs and security errors are given time to show themselves before I jump on a new version bandwagon.

All-in-all, OO’s Writer performed remarkably well.  Adjusting page margins, layout, complex font issues, kerning, and spacing was all a breeze, and OO’s repagination was surprisingly fast and accurate (for a book looking to end up somewhere between 300 and 400 pages).

However, I have one major complaint.  There is no easy way to suppress footers and headers for any page except the first.  In fact, the only legitimate way to do it is to use a complex array of page styles, and even then I had major issues.

This is compounded by the fact that I consider myself a grade-A problem solver when it comes to software use.  As a programmer, I have no problem spending hours debugging problems like this – but I simply could not generate a simple, useful solution to this problem after an entire evening of research.  I debated saving my novel as a .DOC and trying to remedy the problem in Microsoft Word – but lo and behold, they also can’t suppress headers and footers on select pages without major hacking.

How is this possible?!  Has no one ever noticed this problem?  In my mind, this problem is fairly trivial to fix – especially in OO.  On the page properties dialog, simply add an option to SUPPRESS A HEADER OR FOOTER FOR THIS PAGE ONLY.

How hard is that?  Not hard at all.

Anyway, I am now in the process of discovering a good way to submit my request to the OO development team.  With this change, I can honestly say that I could write an entire novel – happily – in OO.  No small feat for an open source competitor to the all-but-ubiquitous MS Word.

OpenOffice.org can be downloaded for free at http://www.openoffice.org/.  They have been a bit overwhelmed by download requests for version 3, so don’t be alarmed if you get a plain-text page instead of their full site!