Can I control spacing at the beginning or end of a Paragraph Style?

The two options about spacing let me control line spacing before and after every paragraph in, say, a text paragraph style like Body Text. But, I might want more or less space at the end of the style to change how the interface between styles looks. Is there an option to control this explicitly? Alternatively, is there a way to say “put exactly x amount of space between paragraphs of style Y”? The closest to that that I can find is the checkbox that says “Don’t put space between paragraphs of the same style.” That would actually solve my earlier question, except that I want space between paragraphs of one style.

If I have understood your problem. You want to have space between paragraphs of one style, but not the others. The “don’t put space between paragraphs of the same style” is paragraph style specific. Just define the one paragraph style and don’t select the checkbox. Select the checkboxes for those paragraph styles where you don’t want to have spaces…Peter

I wonder if the solution is not akin “List” style collection, e.g. “List 1 Start”, “List 1” and “List 1 End” where vertical spacing can be varied: more above at start, more below at end. The inconvenience is styling is manual.

Also, is the intent to achieve something similar to “collapsing margins” in CSS? CSS uses “maximum of” adjoining vertical spacings.

Hmmmmm, I don’t know about the CSS connection, but I suppose having 3 styles like that would work. Seems awfully baroque a solution, though; it would be a lot more straightforward if there was an option that said “Put ___ space between adjacent paragraphs of this style”, and have it ignore/override the “Put ___ space before/after each paragraph of this style” settings.

I would like too to have the suggested option “xxx extra space between adjacent paragraph of this style”; The semantics could be: algebraically add this amount of space (algebraically meaning that this space could be negative to shrink spacing) giving total space equal to “space after (1)” + “space before (2)” + “correction space”.

(1) comes from first paragraph, (2) from second.

Alas, I fear the answer from the developers will be “this is not in ODF specification” and won’t be implemented.