Okay, starting at the beginning: A line break is entered with Shift+Enter.
It creates a line break without creating a new paragraph. It's irrelevant to
the argument now since apparently you were talking about paragraph breaks
(Enter).
You don't want to press Enter twice to get space between paragraphs because
that creates an empty paragraph, which just complicates formatting (for
example, it can wind up at the top of a page, making unnecessary space
there). Instead, you want to add some Spacing Before or After to one of your
styles. In your case, it would make the most sense to add Spacing Before to
the style for the character's name. An easy way to add 12 points Spacing
Before to a paragraph is to press Ctrl+0.
"Keep with next" keeps a paragraph (or some part of it) with the following
paragraph. This doesn't guarantee that the entire paragraph will stick with
the following one: if the first paragraph is four lines or longer, then it
can be split with as few as two lines on either page, but the last two
lines (or more) will stay with the following paragraph. This is the setting
you want for the character's name, so that that (single-line) paragraph will
stay with the lines that follow.
"Keep lines together" keeps the lines of a given paragraph together. This is
the setting you want for your character's lines. Both KWN and KLT are on the
Line and Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog.
Yes, you can create a style that includes four tabs, but not as such. You
create a first-line indent (or a left indent, which will amount to the same
thing since the character's name is a single line) that is the equivalent of
four tabs (if you're talking about the default half-inch tab, then this
would be a 2" indent).
You could probably use Replace to apply the character name style. The
simplest approach would be to apply the style for the lines to the entire
document, then apply the character name style just to the character names.
You'll need to do these one by one. Type one of the names in the "Find what"
box, leave the "Replace with" box blank, and, with the insertion point in
the "Replace with" box, use Format | Style to select the style, then Replace
All.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org
"sam.o" wrote in message
...
Hi All,
And thanks for your help...
By "two line breaks" I meant just hitting return twice... Does that
make any sense? I'm not sure i understand the difference between line/
paragraph breaks? Could anyone explain?
Also i wonder if someone could explain the differences in the "keep
with next" and "keep paragraph" together settings for me...
Defining a "style" as the character name and a "style" for the lines
seems to be the way forward... Does anyone know therefore if I can set
a style to include four tabs before the text? For example I want to
format all the character's names to be tabbed in four times? And also
is it possible to use FIND/ REPLACE to set a style to text?
Off to have a big play with the document now (after having saved a
backup copy of course) to try all of your advice...
Many thanks for your help.
Sam
x
--
sam.o