Keep with next, Widow/orphan, etc all fail

[John Liungman]

I am working on a 40 page document. Formatting is done consistently through
paragraph formats. I use no hard page breaks, only "section breaks to odd
page" at start of new chapters.

Midway through this work headings started appearing at the bottom of pages
instead of keeping with following paragraph, widows and orphans turned up in
body text, and page breaks appeared in paragraphs, despite the fact that my
paragraph style definitons explicitly say differently. All in all, it seems
as if Word has completely disabled all the text flow options.

This happens with all kinds of styles: heading, bullets, body text.

It is possible that the problem first appeared when I reduced the page size
substantially from A4 to roughly A5. I am aware that this can be interpreted
as a collision of rules (ie Keep with next, etc). This is not so however.
Paragraphs are generally short and Word has plenty of chances to get things
right.

I have tried all kinds of workarounds, such as redefining my paragraphs,
rechecking the relevent boxes (widow/orphan, etc), reconnecting with my
template file, etc. Nothing seems to work.

Ideas?

 

[Stefan Blom]

Are you pressing Enter twice to create spacing around paragraphs? If
so, that's the cause of the problem, because each time you press
Enter, you are in fact creating an additional paragraph. "Keep with
next" applies to these empty paragraphs, and then it seems as if it
doesn't work. Remove the empty paragraphs and then add some Spacing
Before to text (or preferably to the style definitions, as
appropriate).

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP


in message
news:[email protected]...

 

[John Liungman]

Thanks Stefan, but nope, that´s not is. I´m meticulous about avoiding extra
line breaks. Other suggestions?

Regards, John

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Assuming that the issue is not *too many* KWN paragraphs, I would suggest
that this sort of problem can indicate document corruption. See
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm

 

[John Liungman]

Hi Suzanne, and thanks for the link to a very interesting article. I tried a
few of the tricks - save as web page and reopen, and copy a paragraph without
the paragraph marker. No luck I´m afraid.

An interesting piece of information for anyone who might harbour a theory is
that the document, when mailed to a colleague, turns out fine on his
computer. Also, my machine is a week old, high performance, with little
installed software except Office and an FTP client. Come to think of it, the
document was actually created on my other machine, then saved to the network
and downloaded to the new machine. Could something have happened in that
process?

Oh, by the way, I use Word 2003 SP2.

Of course, I can solve the problem with a bunch of hard page breaks, but
being orthodox, that´s exactly what I want to avoid

Thanks for all the ideas, keep it up!

John



"Suzanne S. Barnhill" skrev: