Widows, orphans, and staying true to styles

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Amontillado
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 152
Joined: Fri May 04, 2018 4:00 am

Widows, orphans, and staying true to styles

Post by Amontillado »

A question for the court, or at least food for thought. Is my solution to a formatting situation optimal?

I like to let styles handle appearance. I have enough challenges writing words. I shouldn't add to the workload by trying to second guess how they will look when printed.

I have a document with an unfortunately short paragraph, "Here are the options available:"

The next thing in the document is a bulleted list. The short paragraph happens to fall on the last line of a page. It's a one line paragraph, so it isn't an orphan. It's a complete paragraph.

It would be nice to trigger a page break before the one line paragraph so it would be positioned with the bulleted list it introduces.

I can't set "Keep with next" in my body paragraph style because Keep with next doesn't seem appropriate with consecutive paragraphs of the same style. As the documentation states, Keep with next is intended for use with heading styles where a paragraph with Keep with next option is followed by a paragraph without Keep with next.

The solution I hit on was to clone my Body paragraph style, calling it Body one-line.

I left lines at start and lines at end set to 2 lines each. The check box for Keep lines together is checked with the At start/end option. I set Keep with next to 2 lines.

Body one-line's next paragraph style is Body (without Keep with next).

If I change the paragraph style on the one line paragraph to Body one-line, because it falls on the last line of the page it jumps down to the next page and stays with the bulleted list. That's what I want. Body one-line is sort of like a heading style, gently glued to following text, even if it looks like a regular Body paragraph.

Adding text to the Body one-line paragraph, as many lines as I want, doesn't misbehave in any way. If I delete text ahead of the Body one-line paragraph, it is pulled up above the page break along with the bulleted list. In other words, it's working fine.

Is there a better solution, though? Massive obsession over styles is never enough! :-)
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