Adding Line break before sections

Hi does anyone know please… if it would be poss with find and replace?

Sections start with a 16pt heading,

(The only text in the document that’s 16).

I need to add a line break before each heading, without removing the heading

Does anyone know if it’s poss to do this in find and replace please

It’s possible to search for a particular font size. In the Find and Replace window, click on ‘Attributes’ button at the bottom of the window.

Thanks Pansmanse, I tried this,

I was hoping there might be a way to add the line breaks in automatically,

There are about 500 of these… will be a pain to do them one by one, also I mildly fear, messing something else up as I change them…

Why do you need a line break before the section heading? If it is just to increase the space between the preceding text and the section heading then it would be easier just to change the style of the heading to increase the space before. It would take 10-20 seconds.

Assuming the heading is a Heading Style, open the Styles sidebar (F11). In your document, click in one of the section Headings to select the Heading style in the sidebar. Right-click on the Heading style and select Modify… In the dialog that opens, select the tab labelled Indents & Spacing, under the heading Spacing, change the Above paragraph to a more suitable distance, say 4 or 5 mm. OK out and you should see that all the Headings of the same style have updated to the new distance.

Paragraph styles are your friends.

Make a semantic difference between your paragraphs. Those for the “discourse” should be typed with Text Body (select this style from the leftmost menu in the toolbar). The headings should be typed Heading 1 for first level, Heading 2 for second level …

Once this is done, you can customise Heading 1 to add spacing above and below in the Indents & Spacing tab of the style definition. Magically, all paragraphed marked Heading 1 will show the increased spacings.

Styles offer so many formatting possibilities that there is no enough space in an answer to address everything. I recommend you read the Writer Guide, especially the chapters on styles.

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Earnest Al and Ajlittoz, it’s good advice, sorry badly written on my part…

Sorry - heading is also the name of a formatting style…

Are literally “headings” but have no style attached.

I did make the headings, but didn’t add any formatting other than font size.

The text is enormous (1000+ pages) and I didn’t write it, or I may have put these in as I went.

But added the headings quickly (with help of an algorithm).

And I bet the whole document was written typewriter-like, with all text in Default Paragraph Style and vertical spacing with empty paragraphs!

A 1000+ pages document must be styled otherwise you can’t manage it.

You are right Ajlittoz

No direct formatting whatsoever, not even changes in font size

Wow! First task is to structure it a bit with styles (at least Heading n for headings and Text Body for discourse). After that you can start to play a bit with styles instead of hunting for every occurrence of headings.

Hi Ajlittoz

I think my main problem is a lack of training in the program and thus all this is too time consuming, I will watch some youtube videos…

Styling a document may look as a waste of time (at least initially compared to the ease of using buttons and shortcut keys to format text – and the training we received about it), but really, you are winning at least 10-fold on the long term.

I’m not against it… I will heed your advice. In time, thanks