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>
> As I'm sure most of you know, MS Word allows its
> styles to be formatted with spacing before and after
> the style. For example, Body Text might have a 6pt
> space before and a 6 pt space after.
>
> Unfortunately, these spaces add together. For example,
> if Heading 1 has a 12pt space after and Body Text a
> 6pt space before, the resulting gap between the two is
> 18pt. Worse, if Body Text follows Body Text, there is
> now a 12pt space between paragraphs.
>
> I have long been tempted to move to only spacing
> before or after, not both, to eliminate this problem.
> Has anyone else tried this? Comments? Ridicule?
> Financial advice?
>
Most layout / dp / wp software that includes styles has a similar
feature. In my documentation with InDesign I do something like what you
advocate for body text. My "body text" (for the sake of argument) style
has 0 space before and X space after (depending on the point size,
document page size and format, and other variables). On the other hand,
each Heading (again for argument's sake) "Heading 1," "Heading 2,"
"Heading 457.318" style has Y space before and Z space after. The reason
for this is that I want a wee bit more space between the last paragraph
of one section and the heading of the next section than I want between
the heading and the first paragraph of text that goes with it.
Now it's been a while since I've done heavy style use in Word, but the
spacing you're talking about is between paragraph breaks, correct? I've
answered presuming you're not talking about leading between the lines of
the same paragraph. I know you can set this up as well, and I don't
remember whether that's a character style setting you do in Word or a
paragraph style setting.
A question I'd like to put out to the group related to Brian's is this:
does anyone know of any funky ways to say "give me X room before and Y
room after this paragraph style EXCEPT when the NEXT/PREVIOUS style used
is STYLE_A"? I'd be curious if Word, InDesign, FrameMaker, or any of
the other popular page layout programs folks on this list use do that.
I've never had cause to do that in InDesign so I haven't looked for the
capability. It might be something already built in.
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