Is there a way to "hide" breaks if they are the first element of a new page?

[Caferino]

Greetings,
I am new here, and this is my first post, so, I am sorry if I miss something!
I am working on a manuscript, however, sometimes, new pages start with a paragraph break or line break, not sure which one exactly, but I got an example and screenshots to show what I mean:

Imagine you got a text like:

"… Long Paragraph.
Long Paragraph.
Long Paragraph.

Then, the bomb fell.

Long Paragraph.
Long Paragraph.
Long Paragraph…"

If “One year later” gets to be the very last sentence of a page, the blank break after it becomes the first element of the new page, which makes it look kinda bad or weird; unaligned, like this (as a new user, I can only upload one embedded image, so I took a screenshot of the four ones I had in the preview. I hope the size is good enough):

In short: in the first picture, the document ends looking like that when that happens. In the second image, I’d like to remove that break that causes the unnecessary empty line (colored with red in this case), so that the text or document looks like the third or fourth image.

The most important thing is not to delete the break, because if the text gets edited or the print size changes, it could mess with the narration style if it ends looking like this anywhere:

"… Long Paragraph.
Long Paragraph.
Long Paragraph.

Then, the bomb fell.
Long Paragraph.
Long Paragraph.
Long Paragraph…"

So, I was wondering if there is a tool, command or configuration option somewhere to tell LibreOffice to “hide” such breaks when they are the first element of a new page? It would be so helpful!

Thank you all!

[ajlittoz]

From your description, I imagine you’re using Writer like a mechanical typewriter, i.e. you do everything manually. Among other things, you space vertically with an empty paragraph. This is nonsense in the Writer philosophy.

Every paragraph is an object to which the author gives a semantic value, a significance. It can be a title, a heading, a note, a comment or the common development of the subject. You associate this value with a paragraph style you assign to the paragraph.

To follow the examples above, the title of the book will be styled Title, a heading Heading n with n 1-10 indicating the level in the outline, a note Footnote or Endnote, a comment needs a custom style as there is no built-in one, the development Text Body.

Each style is customised for font face, size, weight, indents (=local margins added to page margins) and, what interests you here, spacing above and below paragraph.

When the paragraph is laid out at the top of a page, spacing above is ignored unless you choose compatibility mode with M$ Word in Tools>Options, LibreOffice Writer>Compatibility. The same is true for spacing below at bottom of pages.

What you have to do is to learn how to work with styles, at least paragraph and character styles. Read the Writer Guide for an introduction to styles.

Then, customise Text Body, the standard style for unspecialised text (as opposed to headings, title, notes, …) to add spacing above and below (or one of them only if you’re consistent with the other styles).

PS: it is not clear in your example if

 Long paragraph.
 Long paragraph.

is made of 2 paragraphs without separation or is a single multi-line paragraph. In the latter case, it can be style Text Body like Then, the bomb fell. and the magic of spacing will do. In the formar case, you need an extra paragraph style for the “contiguous” paragraphs.

[Caferino]

Thank you so much, I will look into it! Although it is a MS .docx I am editing with LibreOffice, I am not sure if that could mess things up, because the manuscript is going to be edited with MS Office before publishing (after my edits), and editorials here don’t really use LibreOffice; I do because I find it more comfortable. Nonetheless, I will check out the Styles guide and see what’s up, thank you again!

Regarding the paragraphs, I think they are both, they have no space between them and they are multi-line, I think. They tend to look like this:

[ajlittoz]

Editing a .docx with Writer will (positively) mess things up. Either continue with your procedure but don’t spend much time on styling because what you style will not survive across sessions as M$ Word has a very poor idea about styles; or switch completely to Writer (restarting from scratch because the conversion – all the more if you already had several sessions which have a dramatic cumulative effect – translates concepts only approximately) to benefit from the superior style engine. In the end you can send an .odt to the reviewers on the ground that Word claims to be able to read it (even if M$ intentionally biased the process) or export it to .docx only once your job is finished.