Question concerning the “space above†paragraph formatting option

R

RichG

I make use of styles heavily in the creation of technical documents, and I
generally have most of my styles (headings and body text) set to
automatically add 12 points of space after the paragraph. I do this so that
I do not have to press “Enter†twice after I complete each paragraph. This
does insure a constant spacing between headings and body text.

I would like to have my “Heading 1†style automatically add 24 points of
space before and 12 points of space after. Unfortunately, implementing this
with standard paragraph formatting (spacing before & spacing after) has an
undesirable side effect.

The system displays too much white space above when the “Heading 1†style
happens to be the first paragraph on a page; this causes the page to look
strange.

I would like to have the style always add 24 points of space above except
when that heading is the first paragraph on a page.

Does anyone know of a method to accomplish this using styles (without
manually tweaking)?
 
H

Herb Tyson [MVP]

This is one of those "Word really needs a good solution for this but doesn't
have one" areas. For Heading 1 occurrences that occur at the top of page 2
through the end of the document, you can use the "Suppress Space Before
after a hard page or column break" compatibility option (Tools - Options -
Compatibility). A "gotcha" is that you then need to press Ctrl+Enter (hard
page break) before such headings to have this "exception" apply. This, of
course, sometimes is a PITA, since it means you have to babysit the page
breaks. OTOH... maybe it's not so bad if you actually want EVERY Heading 1
to occur at the top of a new page.

The other thing is that this setting does not affect the first page of a
document. Then again, however, if the first Heading 1 occurs after a TOC,
title page, etc., then you might already have a hard page break in place.
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

But Space Before is always suppressed at the top of the page where there
*isn't* a manual page or section break. And if you want *every* Heading 1 at
the top of a new page, you add "Page break before" to the style definition
and omit the Space Before.
 

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