Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I have set up a successful mail/merge and when printing it is giving me a blank sheet between each document in the merge. I took out the footer in my document thinking it might have given a blank page. No good. Checked the document, and there is no second page in the file. The merged documents are all there, and in the right sequence, and I don't see any way to set the printer to not print the extra pages. I am using a Brother 2140, which I have used in my home office successfully for years. BTW, when I print a merged document from the 'Edit Document' feature, it only prints the single page. Thank you for your attention and support.

As answered for other questions, the workaround is to deselect the option to "print automatically inserted blank pages" ("File->Printer Settings->Options->Other->Print automatically inserted blank pages" or "File->Print->OpenOffice.org Writer->Pages->Print automatically inserted blank pages").

This is a strange feature of OpenOffice Writer.

For some reason, Writer automatically inserts blank pages into the merged document. What you see as page two in the merged document, Writer calls page three. If you look at the merged document in Writer, you can't see page two, but if you included page two in a print range (not recommended because it's just going to confuse you), page two would print as a blank page.

Please try as under:-
1. Go to Tools-->Options
2. Select Print --> LibreOffice Writer or OpenOffice Writer
3. Uncheck the Box Item "Print Automatically inserted blank pages.

Ravindra Sharma

The merge behavior is surprising but it's easy to understand. Where the user expects that the merge document will be extended--new pages added--as needed to hold the merge data, instead the merge document is copied entirely until the data records are all merged. That means, if you have the standard, single page merge document, numbered as page one, then each page of the merge output will be a new copy of the merge document and will also be page one. Yes, really. It's just that weird.

Writer is deeply wired that odd-numbered pages always print on the "right" side, so a document where every page is an odd-numbered page (i.e. "1") will require empty pages in between to keep those odd-numbered pages on the right side.

To avoid this, you have to either tell Writer not to print those extra blank pages, or use a merge document that has enough pages (and suitable "next record" fields) to absorb all the data records. The merged output in that case will have only one copy of the merge document, with the usual alternating odd/even pages, no extra blanks pages needed.

I've just installed OO version 3.4.1 & I cannot find any sort of checkbox as described below by Scott Slocum.

Has there been a change in setting print options?

I really, really want to disable "automatically inserted blank pages" when performing mail merge.

"by Scott Slocum » Thu Aug 09, 2012 12:59 pm
As answered for other questions, the workaround is to deselect the option to "print automatically inserted blank pages" ("File->Printer Settings->Options->Other->Print automatically inserted blank pages" or "File->Print->OpenOffice.org Writer->Pages->Print automatically inserted blank pages")."

It's in Tools>Options>Writer>Print.

With respect in these days of saving resources automatically inserting pages is just about the daftest option to have, let alone to set to active by default.