Everything in your friend’s file is formatted “manually”, directly applied formats without using styles.
For their own sake, when making a large document like a whole book, learn about styles.
The reason for the text jump is that some paragraphs are marked “keep with next”. This works like a “magnet” to pull content down if you can’t fit everything on one page.
To resolve:
Note: The procedure below changes the entire document. You don’t want major upsets. Consider saving a backup first. Do not click on anything else, only what it says in the procedure, to remove the “offending” setting.
Note also: If you are running MacOS, the shortcut keys mentioned below will be cmd
where the procedure says ctrl
.
- Select everything in your document (
ctrl
+A
)
- Select menu item
Format
- Paragraph ...
- Select tab
Text flow
- See the checkbox at Keep with next.
You should see it filled with a square block, signifying “settings vary through selected range”.
Click it one or twice so it is empty (unticked).
OK
Thoughts
There is a lot of direct formatting in the sample, which will most likely hurt the finishing/publishing workflow (in particular if the book is submitted to others for publishing). If you decide to clean up and format from scratch (using styles) you need to remove all direct formatting first. With all content selected (like in the procedure above) you can press ctrl
+M
to remove direct formatting. All content will then have the same font shape and size, so headings may be difficult to spot.
To get started with styles
- Pressing
ctrl
+1
will mark the current paragraph as a heading (shortcut key to apply the Heading 1
style).
- To revert to text body, press
ctrl
+0
.
- If you don’t like the appearance (font face, size, bolding, space above/below) of heading and/or text body, edit the corresponding style instead of formatting directly.
- Styles are found in the right side panel. Click the icon with overlapping
AA
. Right click an entry in the list to edit.
Please share this info with your friend.