Line breaks and paragraph justification

[euanmckay]

Is it possible to insert a line break (insert > breaks > line break) in a justified paragraph and have the line before the line break not aligned to the right side of the page?

The reason is, I want to have a narrow space between several "Citation" style paragraphs (each only one or two lines) yet keep a wider space after the last item in the series and the following "Body" style paragraph. Using a line break would allow me to do this, but then I end up with the last line of each Citation paragraph being aligned to the right side of the page and words too far spaced out.

An alternative would be to create two styles, Citation and Citation-last, but that seems like a hack worthy of MSWord. Or is it possible to request something like the :first-of-type and :last-of-type pseudo-classes for paragraph styles, as in CSS3?

[rpcameron]

I'm not in front of my Mac at the moment, but I seemed to remember that a line break (Shift+Enter) allowed one to insert a new line without causing justification. Unless I had it backwards, and used this technique to force justification of the last line of a paragraph ... drat, wish I could remember.

EDIT: Nope, I had it backwards. A line-break will force justification of a line that only partially fills the horizontal space. As far as I can tell the only way to achieve what you want is to create a paragraph style for either the preceding or the following paragraph that allows for a smaller space between the two paragraphs.

[euanmckay]

Sorry, my explanation wasn't very clear. Shift+Enter was what I was doing, and as you note, that causes justification. For now I've created two styles, but hope the future will bring something like the CSS3-style pseudo-classes I mentioned above.
Thanks for the comment.

[macula]

I was very glad to find this thread. In my view, this is a much-needed feature, and one that would set Mellel apart form its competitors, much as it may seem as a detail at first glance.

The most elegant solution would be to include extra attributes, in each paragraph style, for the beginning of the first paragraph and the ending of the last paragraph.

If this is too overwhelming a design change to make, then a variant of the "line break" that would not force justification of the last paragraph line would be highly helpful as an interim measure. It is extremely inelegant and conceptually inconsistent to create styles just for such special cases.

I would be obliged to the developers if they could let us know what their opinion is.