Few issues with PDFs and Page Break settings

[nickatwork]

Hi all,
I've been working through setting up page breaks in my stylesheet, trying to avoid the need for post-processing in Word and just go straight to PDF, but I'm having a few problems.

1. Is it possible to make a style/heading break only if the page is already partially full? The reason is, some of my heading 3 styles should be starting on a new page because they are appearing near the end of a page and most of the content is displayed on the following page, but some are small enough that there is no need to set a global break as there would be too much white space. screenshot 1.

2. Ive used tables quite a lot, and have managed to get them to break quite nicely where needed, the only area I cant is where a table row is essentially introducing a sub-section, but I want this row to break to the next page in instances where the following row is too big to fit on the same page. screenshot 2.

[whunter]

I was hoping someone would have a good answer for you because I wanted to know too.

Re #1, I don't think there's any way to do this as you are describing. You can configure the heading to avoid having a page break after it (as I'm sure you know), but for that heading and the little paragraph to move to the next page, I think you would have to manually break it.

Re #2, I have tried a myriad of ways to get one row of a table to move to the next page and have been spectacularly unsuccessful. Is that "subhead" row just a regular row that you have formatted, or is it a header row? If it is a true header row that uses a style then you might be able to configure the style with page-break-after:avoid and have it actually work. That is the one thing I have not tried.

[nickatwork]

I managed to get the row moving to the next page.

I added a specific row style for it, then applied the avoid break after option. Its working perfectly fine now. The only issue was that I had no <tr> class styles setup, I'm not using table stylesheets, so I just had a <tr> tag in my code, but I needed to seperate out the ones that were acting as sub-headings and the normal rows that just had text in them. Luckily I had setup <td> class tags specifically for these, not sure why I didnt do <tr> to begin with.

anyway, I was able to us a regular expression to hunt out the specific <tr> that I needed and change it to a particular <tr> class. I have since updated all <tr> tags in my project to have specific classes. just gives more control.

still hoping for a solution to the heading level 3 thing, I would have thought the orphan and widow settings might come into play, but I havent been able to get them to do anything for me. I'm really reluctant to do it manually, as it kind of defeats the purpose, I might as well just use Word

[whunter]

BTW, the orphan and widow settings don't work very well, at least for PDF output. (I don't use Word output so I don't know, but Word itself seems to work pretty well on this.) I have submitted issues to MadCap re widows/orphans, which they have logged as bugs.

[nickatwork]

Yeah looks like manually setting the breaks is the onyl way. Im just using the TOC to start new chapters, seems to be the easiest. I was hoping for a much more automated solution though.

[alex]

Giving this a bump because I am still getting lots of weird orphans in PDF output, regardless of my widow/orphan settings in the stylesheet.

Short of manually applying page breaks for PDF output or having to apply a "keepwith" style to any paragraphs you think could split awkwardly, has anyone found a way to make this work?