IMHO, you’re the one to blame.
I’ve looked thoroughly to your document and I unfortunately think it can’t be formatted because you are using Writer like a mechanical typewriter:
- everything is direct-formatted
- the only applied style is Default Paragraph Style and all paragraphs receive manual attributes to get what you want
- vertical spacing is achieved through empty paragraphs
-
yes, I know, your appendices are Text Body but this only because you use Appendix for appendix headings and when you then hit Enter, you automatically switch to Text Body but you continued to apply manual formatting.
Note that Text Body is the normal style for text. Default Paragraph Style is reserved for setting attributes common to all other styles.
- you messed up page styles by configuring Default Page Style to switch to First Page on page overflow. To compensate for automatic return to Defaul Page Style, you customised First Page to continue on itself.
You additionally forced a page break to start page 2 which may contribute to the problem, see below.
In principle, First Page is intended for the cover page and Default Page Style for running pages. You inverted usage but it doen’t matter.
- due to the absence of styling (no consistent use of paragraph nor character styles) and you manual spacing, you interfere badly with Writer automatic layout
Though I didn’t find any Keep with next paragraph attribute, you “space-stuffing” empty paragraphs somehow “lock” some page areas.
When section contents is modified or when a new section is added, “something” makes Writer believe that a monolithic block is pushed to next page. Therefore the section which extends from the preceding paragraph to the following paragraph is not constrained and thus will occupy the rest of the page, no matter the evenly distribute contents … setting.
Usually, Tools>Update>Update All fixes section “glitches”, but here nope.
I saved your document as .fodt to be able to look at the encoding. I did this before and after fiddling with the section. After fiddling, a “soft page break” is added right after the section(s). This means that the section extends down to the bottom of the page, removing any height constraint, rendering the even distribution ineffective.
In the present state, I fear there is no solution. The only real fix I see is to follow a strict styling discipline. A document is always structured. Styles are a translation of this structure (never think of styles as typographical attributes drivers: they are semantic markers of the importance of paragraphs and words; typographical attributes come as a consequence of this, not the other way round). Presently, your document is not structured as all; it is hardly manually laid out.
You possibly have a deadline for submission, but it is really worth the trouble. When I paste as unformatted text into a blank document and begin to apply built-in styles, removing empty paragraphs, I have no problem with the section. I didn’t customise the styles as this was only a check for behaviour, but I think that this a half an hour job to get your document right and “professional”. Since you probably don’t master styles, this is more like one day for you.
PS: you also have spurious line breaks Shift+Enter in the paragraph below “Parking Study”.
