Unwanted page breaks in PDF

[WrightStuff]

How can I prevent white space in the PDF? Seems like Help and Manual inserts page breaks, I can't actually see them but I need the text to flow on to the next page without the white space

[Tim Green]

Hi Stephen,

Turn on visible paragraph end marks in View > Program Options > Editor to make sure you can see empty paragraphs. If you have them at the end of a topic this can easily trigger a page break, because empty paragraphs are also paragraphs and will be rendered. Over and above that, you may have automatic page breaks set in your PDF template:

If you just need a single page break for a special case you can insert it with the page break tool in Write > Insert Object. Page breaks for new topics should be inserted at the beginning of the new topic, not at the end of the previous topic. Make sure that the page break does not include an empty paragraph (you may need to delete the empty paragraph after inserting the break, otherwise the break may separate the topic body and header).

Normally, however, you will want automatic page breaks at the end of topics on a certain level. For example, you might want page breaks at the beginning of all top-level topics, but lower-level topics should follow directly without page breaks.

You can define automatic page breaks for all topic levels in your PDFs by editing the print manual template (see the PDF & Printed Manuals chapter in the help for details on how to edit the template). select the Topics section of the template and then select Pages > Page Options (or double-click on an empty section of the page). You can then define the page break options separately for each level in the table at the bottom of the page.

Note 1: The page break setting for "Section starts..." at the top of the dialog is only for the beginning of the entire Topics section, i.e. for the very first topic in the project.

Note 2: When you set page breaks for odd pages you must also make sure that you turn off the option "Ignore blank pages in PDF" in your PDF project properties (Project Explorer > Configuration > Publishing Options > PDF > PDF Layout). When this option is on all blank pages will be suppressed and it often won't be possible for topics to start on odd pages.

[WrightStuff]

I have tried switching on visible paragraph end marks in View > Program Options > Editor to make sure you can see empty paragraphs

Cant see any visible paragraph end marks.png

There doesn't seem to be hidden characters which would cause the page break which happens in the PDF after What if I forget my Password?

What if I forgot my password.png

Do you have any more ideas about how to fix this?

[Tim Green]

That is an expanding text toggle, which means that the text under the toggle heading is in a table (which you didn't mention). There are two things that may be happening here:

1) The table is not set to allow breaking at page boundaries.
Click inside the table in the editor. Then right-click and select Table and Properties and make sure the table is set to allow breaks.

2) The paragraphs inside the table are non-breakable
This happens if you use the keep lines together and/or keep with next paragraph settings in multiple consecutive paragraphs, or even in a single large paragraph. Those settings need to be used sparingly, ideally only for headings. For example, if you set them in a body text style you will create a large block of unbreakable text that behaves like a large image.

Another possibility is that the toggle table contains a large image.