Add page break if distance is lower than...

[Horst Reichert]

It would be nice to add an option to the Print Manual Designer. As I do not want to have small Topic Text blocks below major headers I must mark the following paragraphs in H&M Line and Page Breaks tab to “Keep Paragraph with next”. This is very tedious for maybe hundreds of possible chapters.
I think this could be better atomized adding an option to the Print Manual Designer Page Options. I would like to have added a distance to the relevant level heading which will force a page break if the position of the header is below and the rest of the page is too small for a “nice” looking text block afterwards.

[Tim Green]

Hi Horst,

There is an easier solution -- just use styles. Define a variant of the style you are using for your paragraphs to include keep with next and apply it whenever you know that you want to keep two paragraphs together after a heading. It will be some work to apply it now but once you have got it set up and use it while you are editing it will go smoothly.

[Horst Reichert]

I am talking about Topic headers which will be followed by paragraphs using different styles some are breakable tables, some are no breakable tables some are “Normal” style paragraphs some are “Source code” paragraphs e.tc.c.
The Print Manual Designer only supplies the option to have breaks all the time with a topic header level or not to break. The following topic text will contain all the range of styles described above. I want to make things easier formatting PDF-Text. This is now:
1 Compile project
2 Look at output and see that there is an “ugly” header at the bottom followed by 3-4 lines of topic text
3 Close PDF
4 Mark topic text to keep together (as proposed by you) or insert a manual page break above
5 Repeat from 1 until end of project

After you do some changes in the project the whole formatting would start again.

If the Print Manual Designer would have the requested „Distance“ option this would be all automized.

[Dean Whitlock]

Hi Horst,

The print manual designer allows you to specifiy the minimum height of the topic band. If the space left on the page is smaller than the specified height of the topic band, the topic is forced to the next page (along with the header). It takes a little playing around to get a feel for when a page break will occur because it can be affected by long tables and images that follow paragraphs that are set to "keep with next", all of which can cause page breaks where you don't expect them. But it works in general. In the Topics section of the print manual designer, simply click on the topic band and then grab its lower edge and adjust its height.

Good luck,
Dean

[Horst Reichert]

Good point,
This will work for most projects as I proposed.
But my project will not display topic headers deeper than level 3 (setting header band height to 0). This would cause the topics included in those deeper levels to have ugly large Breaks after the last paragraph to the next.