Conditional formatting? Space before @ top of page

T

Trey Shaffer

I think I know the answer to this, but just want to make sure...

Word Version 2003/SP2.

I am familiar with the Paragraph formatting dialog, in particular the Space
Before and Space After settings.

What I would like is a way to eliminate "Space Before" for the first
paragraph on every page. This is particularly an issue for headings where I
tend to use larger Space Before values.

I'm not sure exactly how the "Auto" setting in the spacing parameter works,
but it still inserts spacing at the top of the page.

This could be a "wish list" item for a later version.

Perhaps there is a VBA script to do this? To be truly useful, it would have
to restore the Space Before value to a paragraph if it was removed once,
being at the top of a page, and later reformatted away from the top of page.

Your thoughts appreciated
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

Space Before is always suppressed at the top of a page (and Space After at
the bottom) except after a manual page break or a section break. Nothing can
be done about the section breaks except manually removing the space, but
there is a Compatibility Option to "Suppress Space Before after a hard page
or column break."
 
C

Charles Kenyon

One addition to Suzanne's remarks is that you do not want to routinely be
using manual page breaks. They will cause problems. Instead format the first
paragraph of the new page to have paragraph formatting of page break before.
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide




--------- --------- --------- --------- --------- ---------
This message is posted to a newsgroup. Please post replies
and questions to the newsgroup so that others can learn
from my ignorance and your wisdom.
 
T

Trey Shaffer

Thanks to Suzanne and Charles...

I didn't realize the manual breaks were handled differently, and I tend to
use them quite a bit.

Charles,
Would you care to elaborate on other issues with manual breaks? One I have
noticed is that they somehow link the Style of the paragraph following the
break with the paragraph preceding the break. This is a problem that is
solved with your suggestion about modifying the paragraph style to include
the Break Before...
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

The style carryover is the primary issue. Note, however, that manual page
breaks of any kind (even paragraphs with "Page break before") are best
avoided except in cases where a given style or paragraph should *always*
start a new page. Manual page breaks can wreak havoc when documents are
reflowed for a different printer (see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/TextReflow.htm).

One caution about "Page break before": if your document will be used by
others, this "invisible" formatting can cause serious confusion for
less-sophisticated Word users, who won't understand why the page is breaking
when there is no apparent manual page break (they are also confused by the
use of "Keep with next" and "Keep lines together" to control text flow).



Trey Shaffer said:
Thanks to Suzanne and Charles...

I didn't realize the manual breaks were handled differently, and I tend to
use them quite a bit.

Charles,
Would you care to elaborate on other issues with manual breaks? One I have
noticed is that they somehow link the Style of the paragraph following the
break with the paragraph preceding the break. This is a problem that is
solved with your suggestion about modifying the paragraph style to include
the Break Before...
Click to expand...
 
C

Charles Kenyon

One additional problem with manual page breaks is that they confuse StyleRef
fields and Tables of Contents.

Much of the problem stems from the fact that, for Word, the manual page
break is a part of the following paragraph - the paragraph on the next page.
Thus it has the style of that paragraph.

They also tend to (I think) increase document corruption. It has been so
long since I've regularly used them that I could be mistaken on this.
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide




--------- --------- --------- --------- --------- ---------
This message is posted to a newsgroup. Please post replies
and questions to the newsgroup so that others can learn
from my ignorance and your wisdom.


Trey Shaffer said:
Thanks to Suzanne and Charles...

I didn't realize the manual breaks were handled differently, and I tend to
use them quite a bit.

Charles,
Would you care to elaborate on other issues with manual breaks? One I
have noticed is that they somehow link the Style of the paragraph
following the break with the paragraph preceding the break. This is a
problem that is solved with your suggestion about modifying the paragraph
style to include the Break Before...
Click to expand...
 
Top