Best way to add space at top of page (e.g. chapter titles)

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chronodm
Posts: 8
Joined: 2012-09-06 15:53:40

Best way to add space at top of page (e.g. chapter titles)

Post by chronodm »

So, I want my chapter titles to be (for instance) three inches down from the top margin. Coming from the MS Word world, I'm used to just setting "page break before" and "space before = 3 inches" on my chapter-title styles. This doesn't work in NWP, because NWP ignores space before at the top of the page ("per typographic tradition", I think some other post on this forum said). That makes sense for a lot of uses but not for this one, for a style that's only ever going to appear at the top of a page. If anyone from Nisus is listening, it'd be awesome if that was configurable on a per-style basis.

Right now I'm reduced to adding a blank body text line at the top of each page, which I'm finding disproportionately irritating. Another forum suggested as a workaround using line spacing instead, but that only works if you can guarantee your title's not going to run over a single line, which I can't. Creating and formatting a section for each chapter seems way too complicated, especially when there's already sections for front matter and so on.

So what's the right NWP way to do this?
bobmacatq
Posts: 13
Joined: 2011-01-14 17:49:49

Re: Best way to add space at top of page (e.g. chapter title

Post by bobmacatq »

How about adding a blank one-line table 3" wide?

bob
Groucho
Posts: 497
Joined: 2007-03-03 09:55:06
Location: Europe

Re: Best way to add space at top of page (e.g. chapter title

Post by Groucho »

Hello, chronodm.

I am afraid there is no straight way to it. I posted a feature request in the past. It was resuscitated some time ago. You are a plus one. I was thinking of something like in Mellel, i.e. a checkbox in the paragraph palette that allows for space before to be applied at section/document start or not. For now, I am adding a blank line between a section/document start and the first paragraph. I remove it when the document is to be sent to Word/OpenOffice/LibreOffice or to the publisher. It’s a workaround. Better than nothing.

Greetings, Henry.
chronodm
Posts: 8
Joined: 2012-09-06 15:53:40

Re: Best way to add space at top of page (e.g. chapter title

Post by chronodm »

Lovely. It seems like a long-standing issue -- are there just not many users in the Nisus community that lay things out this way?

The table solution seems like even more of a hassle than the blank line, though since I'm not fully up on NWP tables yet, maybe there's some trick to it I'm not seeing.
feat
Posts: 105
Joined: 2004-01-29 04:17:10
Location: Paris, FR

Re: Best way to add space at top of page (e.g. chapter title

Post by feat »

chronodm wrote:are there just not many users in the Nisus community that lay things out this way?
yes, there are, but I, for one, have solved this by redefining the style of my chapter-title heading [+ no header on a new chapter page] and it's good enough for my needs...
chronodm
Posts: 8
Joined: 2012-09-06 15:53:40

Re: Best way to add space at top of page (e.g. chapter title

Post by chronodm »

When you say 'redefining the style', you mean, just living with not having space above your chapter titles?
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