How can I add a manual column break without adding spacing before paragraph?

Hi, I have the following text:

Heading 1 - Column 1 title
Some regular content
Heading 1 - Column 2 title
Some regular content

I want to have this in 2 columns, so I set it to 2 columns.

I want the headings to start each column so I add a manual column break before the title for column 2.

I want all my Heading 1 (not only in this multicolumn section but in all my document) to have 0.5 cm of spacing “above paragraph” (top margin) so I set my Heading 1 style to Space before text: 0.5 cm.

This works but the columns are vertically misaligned.

How can I fix this?

Thanks in advance

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I just corrected my question. It was not “space before text” but “spacing above paragraph” in the Indents & Spacing tab from the Paragraph window.

You could try to set the Heading 1 style to insert column break if you always want it to start a new column when you have columns set up. This should yield the same alignment as with manually inserted column break, but perhaps not always. See the text flow tab when you edit paragraph style.

This column break should have no effect when your page style does not use multiple columns.

That’s clever! Considering that column breaks have no effect on non-column sections, always inserting them for certain use cases doesn’t sound bad at all! The vertical misalignment still occur, though.

It seems like a bug, that a paragraph that starts the first column in a section has a different actual top spacing compared to another paragraph of the same style starting the second column. Please file it.

In the mean time, if your headings always start a new page/column, you may simply reset the space above of the style to 0; otherwise, you possibly would do that manually for the selected headings, or introduce a child heading paragraph style inheriting from Heading 1, with the spacing above = 0, to use in such places.

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Filed tdf#129304.

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I just tested the child header workaround and it works beautifully. Thanks!

Also, thank you for filing the bug. I see that you already did some tests. I will subscribe to it.