Hi,
As the final step of my very large documents, I go through it to see whether paragraph breaks are inconsistent. When I find them all I want to do is set that specific paragraph to keep with the next one. I find it cumbersome to have to right-click, select paragraph style, click the button, and close the window. Is there a way to show the current styling of the paragraph and to just click on a checkbox to see “Keep with next”?
Thanks,
L
Marking parts of the body of your text keep with next paragraph is likely to increase inconsistency of paragraph breaks. Reserve that setting for headings and table captions.
Maybe you need to adjust widows and orphans, now called something else in LibreOffice [Split Options] and is on the Text flow tab, but refers to how many lines should remain on a page where a paragraph breaks across pages. [If you are trying to maximise lines per page at the expense of readability then reduce the split to one line]
If you had properly used styles in your document, it would be just one adjustment for the entire document. You should refer to the Writer Guide, download from English documentation | LibreOffice Documentation - LibreOffice User Guides . I think it is chapter 20 that covers styles in detail.
In addition to the above, depending on the version of Libreoffice Writer, the feature Spotlight might be useful.
IMHO you follow an inconsistent 
track because you haven’t perhaps abstracted enough your text and its structure.
A paragraph, be it composed of several sentences, presents a single “idea” to the reader. This idea is pushed to Writer as a (paragraph) style. And you create visual distinctions between styles by adjusting their properties.
If your document is thoroughly and systematically styled, your paragraphs will always be consistent. Avoid adding “exceptions” manually (+): direct formatting is your worst foe when you fine-tune your formatting and layout before publishing. It must be cleared (and you must remember where you added it) to be transferred to an adjacent location; it can’t be moved.
Keep with next should only be considered with the significance of the paragraph category. It is legitimate only when said paragraph is linked to the next one by a strong semantic association, i.e. it is a starting point of a sequence and can’t be detached from it by a page break. As an example, think of a heading (already mentioned by @EarnestAl).
Keep with next also disturbs smooth behaviour of text distribution. If you are not careful enough, you may end up with a long sequence of consecutive Keep with next paragraphs which in fact disables the request: Writer has to break the long sequence somewhere and will do it where it can, not where you expect it.
(+) Direct formatting (DF) is legitimate for “exceptional exceptions”. You should not have more than a handful of these, mainly manual page breaks, even in a several 100-page document. DF is also useful to limit the number of styles. Having an excessive number of styles is as harmful as DF particularly when styles are applied only once (making them equivalent to DF or to what is produced by conversion from DOC(X)).
Okay looks like I kind of fumbled my explanation here. To be fair I was pressed for time and had to finish this quickly so I didn’t take much time to write my original request. I will clarify here but if needed I can scratch the original post and create a new one.
First of all I understand styles, I understand orphans, and I use them all the time. It’s actually one of the reasons I prefer using Writer to using Word. I find that the use of styles is more consistent even though there are bugs once in a while.
When I create a large document I don’t focus on the layout until my final pass. I let the styles do their work as expected. However there are sometimes awkward (instead of inconsistent) paragraph positionings on the page. This mainly happens with bullet lists. I will have a paragraph followed by a bullet list. The paragraph has only one bullet point on one side and a longer one on the other side and it just does not look good. So at that point I want certain bullets to stick with the next one but not every time.
For example something like this:
Single line paragraph.
Looks awkward to me if Bullet 1 doestn’t stay with the single line paragraph. So at the bottom of a page, I would want all of them to move to the same page, and I would mark the single line paragraph, The heading and bullet one as kept with next.
However if instead of having a single-line paragraph I have a multi-line paragraph, I would be okay with only having bullet one at the top of the next page but I don’t necessarily want the multi-line paragraph to follow.
This step is often close to the very last one I do. So conceivably I could put a hard page break but I prefer using the “keep with next” approach because there have been times where I had to go back and make modifications and dealing with hard page breaks became more cumbersome than using this softer “keep with next” approach.
Based on the comments, it seems to me like this would be only useful for me so no big deal. I was just checking if there was something like that already that I was not using.
L
I better understand now.
First of all you need a dedicated style for the paragraph preceding the list. Let’s call it Pre-list. Its Next style will be Numbering 1 or whatever style you chose for your list.
I experimented with orphan/widow parameters and this is satisfactory for a multi-line paragraph.
However, it does net yield what you expect with a single-line paragraph. I added Keep with next but then it messes up the multi-line case.
I am afraid there is no automatic solution with present style implementation (parameters are “static” while your case requires conditional application of parameters).
Thanks. As I said in my original message. I was looking for a “quick format” feature.
For example I know that I can view the current formatting of the current paragraph using the spotlight tool I guess it’s called. But that’s static. What would be cool—but it’s a lot of work so I don’t think it’ll ever get done—would be the ability to change direct formatting within that window. So instead of just showing what the formatting is, if I could click a toggle for “Keep with Next” in that window, instead of right-clicking, opening the menu, navigating to the tab for the “Keep with Next” tab, it would be that much faster.
That said, I realize it is a pretty niche case so I’m not expecting it to be implemented.
Thanks for all your help.
L
As a next step, single line paragraph followed by a list is a pattern quite recognizable by code.
maybe @Lupp has already that in all his snippets archive ?
My idea would be to have a second paragraph style ready, perhaps as body-text and body-text-kwn where you “manually” assign the second one only to the single-line cases to avoid the effekt
But I have not tried this…
I thought of this but I discarded it because it is akin to direct formatting: you decide which style to apply based on visual appearance (single- or multi-line). It is manual and you must review styling when you edit text.
Despite that, it is probably much better than pure direct formatting if no other solution can be found.
BTW:
“Hersteller” is the German word for someone who finalizes a book or similar printed work in a logically consistent and pleasing form, while observing printing rules that may vary depending on the case. The person is expected to be employed by a publishing company.
What is the English term for such a person?
Somebody here who knows?
Production Editor