Ensure paragraph is surrounded by preceding and following paragraphs

[j_piper]

I am writing a novel with Libre Writer 24.2.7.2. A few times per chapter, I place three asterisks on their own line to indicate a scene change. However, these asterisks sometimes end up at the very top or bottom of a page such that none of the previous or following paragraphs respectively are visible. I dislike this behavior, but I suppose it’s acceptable. I also insert a blank line (instead of asterisks) between paragraphs to mark minor scene changes. When these blank lines end up at the top or bottom of a page, however, they are impossible to notice.

How can I make a line stay with some portion of the previous and following paragraphs, i.e.:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim aeque doleamus animo, cum corpore dolemus, fieri tamen permagna accessio potest, si aliquod aeternum et infinitum impendere.
Blank line or line with three asterisks
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim aeque doleamus animo, cum corpore dolemus, fieri tamen permagna accessio potest, si aliquod aeternum et infinitum impendere.

And not

Top of page
Blank line or line with three asterisks
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim aeque doleamus animo, cum corpore dolemus, fieri tamen permagna accessio potest, si aliquod aeternum et infinitum impendere.

Or

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim aeque doleamus animo, cum corpore dolemus, fieri tamen permagna accessio potest, si aliquod aeternum et infinitum impendere.
Blank line or line with three asterisks
Bottom of page

Furthermore, how much of a previous or following paragraph to stay glued to this center line should be governed by widow and orphan control. That way, if either paragraph surrounding the center line is long, only, say, two lines would stay attached to the center line.

I hope that makes sense… Is this possible? If not, is there some way to emulate this behavior?

Thank you for your help.

[ajlittoz]

The parameters you need are all located in the Text Flow tab of a paragraph style.

My guess: at least three paragraph styles are necessary:

• one for the scene boundary banner (with three asterisks)
  Can automatically switch to narrative style.
• one for narrative paragraphs
• one for start of minor scene change
  Can also automatically switch to narrative style.

Never use blank line to space paragraph apart. They’ll sooner or later play nasty tricks on your back. An empty paragraph has no semantic contents. Therefore it should not exist. If you need extra spacing in some paragraph, this is an intrinsic property of the paragraph significance. E.g. this extra spacing can be encoded as Spacing Above in the minor scene change paragraph style.

If you don’t want page breaks between specific paragraphs, use Keep with next paragraph text flow property. This can be set in the scene boundary style.

Keeping the scene boundary with the preceding paragraph is more complicated and needs a specific “end-of-scene” paragraph style (which can automatically switch to boundary and have the Keep with next paragraph attribute). This is necessary to avoid setting Keep with next paragraph in the narrative style which would turn your whole document into an atomic block. Therefore you specifically tag end of scene with the dedicated style.

PS: the suggestion above assumes your document is fully styled (and you’re familiar with styles) and your document is saved native .odt.

[j_piper]

Thank you very much for helping me out, @ajlittoz. I’ll give it a try and let you know how it goes!

[j_piper]

@ajlittoz

Keeping the scene boundary with the preceding paragraph is more complicated and needs a specific “end-of-scene” paragraph style (which can automatically switch to boundary and have the Keep with next paragraph attribute).

Yes, I was able to create minor scene changes by adding space after the last paragraph before a minor scene change via the paragraph-style menu, i.e., “edit style,” “indents & spacing,” “spacing,” and “below paragraph.” I then enabled “keep with next paragraph” under “text flow.” This works great if the preceding paragraph is less than two lines. However, if it is a longer paragraph, it no longer breaks properly across pages. Instead, it moves the whole paragraph onto the top of the next page.

This behavior confuses me considering that both “keep with next paragraph” and “allow to split paragraph” are enabled. It seems that enabling the former de facto disables the latter.

Why won’t the paragraph at the end of one minor scene change break across pages when it belongs to a style that has “keep with next paragraph” and “allow to split paragraph” settings enabled? Yes, I want it to keep with the next paragraph (i.e., the first paragraph of the next scene), but I also want it to be able to split across pages, as governed by the “allow to split paragraph” settings.

Any ideas?

(This is only problematic when the minor or major scene change happens to be at the top or bottom of a page.)

[ajlittoz]

Attach a short sample file exhibiting the issue.