[John McGhie]

Hi Kevin:

No, nothing has changed: Word does do it automatically, but the design of
the feature is very buggy. There's a complex set of rules to determine
whether Word suppresses space at the top of the page or not. That's the
bug. What "should" happen is that it works every time. What "does" happen
is that Word works through a decision tree to decide whether it's going to
do what it should.

Very simplistically, the rule is "If WORD threw the paragraph to the next
page, Word will suppress space above. If YOU threw the paragraph, Word will
print the space."

So: If you use a hard page break, a column break, a section break, or
anything else that you type to move the paragraph to the top of the next
page, you'll get the space.

If you use Keep Lines Together and Keep With Next in combination to persuade
Word to move the paragraph for you, it will correctly suppress the space.
You must use Keep Lines Together to prevent Word splitting a paragraph
therwise Keep With NExt cannot operate. I tend to use Keep Lines Together
on all my body text styles anyway: forcing readers to chase paragraphs from
one page to another is bad document design that belongs way in the past:
paper doesn't cost that much these days :-)

Of course, the exception is legal contracts where a single sentence may run
more than one page :-)

Word does have an option in teh Compatibility Options that allows you to
force it to sppress space above at the top of the page always. Be careful
with that one: it can result in some strange effects, and you have to set it
for each document.

One thing I do that helps is to use ONLY space below on the body text
styles. This prevents a ragged top margin because no matter ow the
paragraph gets to the top of the page, there is no space above to make it
look silly. With Headings, f course, you do need to use space above. But
generally, a Word document will require less pagination intervention if you
conevert your styles where possible to use only space below.

Hope this helps

--

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs

+61 4 1209 1410,


"Kevin" wrote in message
oups.com...
Is there a way to suppress paragraph "spacing before" when a paragraph
starts at the top of a new page or column? I'm using Word 2003.
Previous discussions about this say that Word does it automatically,
but that's not happening in my documents (previous discussions were
using previous versions of Word. Has something changed?).

Thanks,
Kevin