Well, shouldn't I feel stupid now? Of course, I had to post my stupidity for all to see before I could find what was plainly in sight. How typical!

Just for the sake of anybody who might be misled by my question above, the style that introduces a new page layout should only be applied to a single paragraph and it seems to remain effective for the rest of the document (unless, of course, you need to apply a new page layout). All following paragraphs should have a style that is not linked with any page layout.

So, here's the corrected code that does the job properly:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;

use utf8;
use Win32;
use Encode;
use OpenOffice::OODoc;
use Data::Dumper::AutoEncode;

ooLocalEncoding('utf-8');

my $curfolder = Win32::GetCwd();
my $outfolder = $curfolder . '\\out';
my $outfile   = $outfolder . '\\test.odt';

my $doc = odfDocument(
    file         => $outfile,
    create       => 'text',
    opendocument => 0,
);
my $styles = odfDocument(
    container => $doc,
    part      => "styles",
);
my $centerfooter = $styles->createStyle(
    'centerfooter',
    family     => "paragraph",
    properties => {
        "fo:margin-top" => "0.5cm",
        "fo:text-align" => 'center',
    },
    replace => 1,
);
my $headerstyle = $styles->createStyle(
    "header",
    family     => "paragraph",
    parent     => "Standard",
    properties => {
        "fo:margin-top"  => "8cm",
        "fo:text-align"  => "center",
        "fo:break-after" => "page",
    },
    replace => 1,
);
$styles->styleProperties(
    $headerstyle,
    -area            => "text",
    "fo:font-size"   => "200%",
    "fo:font-weight" => "bold",
);
$styles->setAttributes(
    $headerstyle,
    "master-page-name" => 'header',
);
my $regularnextstyle = $styles->createStyle(
    "regularnext",
    family  => "paragraph",
    parent  => "Standard",
    replace => 1,
);
my $regularstyle = $styles->createStyle(
    "regular",
    family  => "paragraph",
    parent  => "regularnext",
    replace => 1,
);
$styles->setAttributes(
    $regularstyle,
    "master-page-name" => 'pagenumbers',
);

my $pagelayout = $styles->pageLayout("Standard");
my $titlepage = $styles->createMasterPage(
    'titlepage',
    layout => $pagelayout,
);

my $pnpage = $styles->createMasterPage(
    'pagenumbers',
    layout => $pagelayout,
);
my $pn = $styles->createParagraph( '', 'centerfooter' );
my $pg = $styles->textField( 'page-number', style => 'centerfooter' );
$styles->appendElement( $pn, $pg );
$styles->masterPageFooter( 'pagenumbers', $pn );

my $wordlist = $doc->appendParagraph(
    text  => '',
    style => 'header',
);
$doc->extendText( $wordlist, uc 'Main Title', 'header' );
my $regular = $doc->appendParagraph(
    text  => 'Some text.',
    style => 'regular',
);
$doc->appendParagraph(
    text  => 'More text.',
    style => 'regularnext',
);
for (my $i = 0; $i < 100; $i++) {
    $doc->appendParagraph(
        text  => 'And some more.',
        style => 'regularnext',
    );
}
$doc->save;
[download]

For a first approximation, "stupid" & "stupidity" apply only to SOPWs who haven't bothered to read the docs... and sometimes, not even then.

However, you appear to have independently rediscovered teddy bear (aka, rubber ducky) debugging.

Congrats... and use the approach in good health. And, BTW, ++ for showing your solution to your original problem.




Spirit of the Monastery

Additional ++ for the documentation of your rubber-duck-debugging session (perhaps as a scoobie-snack for not purging the initial content :-) ).

--MidLifeXis