I have a technical document with equations, graphs, and images. It is written in a chatty style: I prefer “For example in this image… [image] …the colours are saturated.” to “The example in fig.10 has saturated colours.” I know the explicit reference remains understandable no matter how the page is formatted, where my preferred version may be scrambled by an unfortunate page break. However, this seems like ‘the tail wagging the dog’ - I want the tools to support my informal style, rather than modify my style to fit the tools.
There are ways and means for grouping things together, such as frames and tables. I sometimes use them to group equations, or arrange images. But this is hard work. It also groups features into larger blocks making it harder to pour the content into different shapes for .pdf .epub, and so on. If I have missed a simple way to group an arbitrary section of the document so it is not broken by and automatic page break (unless it is longer than the page, of course), then I am a fool and you may tell me so because that would be most of what I need.
If not, let us imagine a new feature…
Suppose we could insert a page break hint instead of a page break. This would mark a good place for a page break. This might be replaced by a page break if it was the lowest hint in the current page, and in the bottom third. If I had put a hint before my example, I would know I had at least a third of a page after the hint, so my text and image would probably stay together. If I could stick a hint before a Contents 1 entry then my TOC entries for each chapter might stay together in blocks.
My ‘third of a page’ is arbitrary: this about the fraction of a page I would be willing to leave blank rather than force a page break where I would rather not have one. Or we could have a no page break hint that could be delimit the section we want to keep on the same page.
There may be other ways to do this.
NB: I asked about putting breaks in a TOC earlier today.
Reply to comments, (particularly JEDIMASTER).
I do not lay out everything with a ruler and squared paper. I think I work as ‘writer’ intends: I add a paragraph and I hope everything below shuffles down. Most of the time this is fine, but sometimes I get surprises. I feel the right solution must be to fix the problem as you see it now, with page layout hints that should not give problems when everything moves again. If I really knew this is the last pass, I can force page breaks, but when do we ever know we are finished?