The word processors of both LibreOffice and OpenOffice free open-source office suites have an annoying habit of inserting blank pages in documents. These insidious pages won’t show until you go to print the document.

Libre- and OpenOffice do this because of their insistence upon interpreting every document as a “book”, with left and right pages. If you fiddle with the page numbering or page breaks, you may find yourself with blank pages inserted to “help” you keep your “book”‘s odd/even pages properly lined up.

Mostly what I print from word processors are contracts, memos, faxes, and letters, so the whole book format doesn’t matter to me and the blank pages are basically just a royal pain. After finagling around a bit trying to find out how to remove these blank pages based on where and how I add breaks and page numbering, I discovered the easy solution.

When you go to print your OpenOffice or LibreOffice document, go to the Open-/LibreOffice Writer tab and un-check the box to “print automatically inserted blank pages”. Done. You’ll see the page numbers below the preview on the left decrease accordingly.