“A whole article on page numbering?” someone asked when I said I was doing this article. “Isn’t that kind of basic?”
The answer is that, at the simplest level, it is. However, add different numbering styles, restarting numbering, or automating numbering, and the apparently basic topic quickly becomes more complicated. Set up a master document, and still another dimension is added. What at first seems like a straightforward task has far more options than many users imagine.
Moreover, in LibreOffice (or OpenOffice.org, for that matter), generally, you’ll want to put page numbers in headers or footers, so they are separate from the rest of the text on a page and easy to read. Setting up a header or foot is not difficult, but it does add another step or two to the apparently basic task of adding a page number.