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Re: Shift + enter option?

Subject: Re: Shift + enter option?
From: Beth Agnew <beth -dot- agnew -at- senecac -dot- on -dot- ca>
To: TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 11:51:54 -0500

Another reason to avoid extraneous new paragraph commands is that sometimes they'll have a style such as Heading that will be picked up when your Table of Contents is generated, giving you a blank line with a page number in the TOC. And for us old fogies, I'd like to point out that Geoff said "carriage returns". LOL

Geoff Hart wrote:

Michelle Anderson wondered (on behalf of an anonymous poster): <<I'm wondering if anyone has heard about using the "shift + enter" option to reduce the number of paragraph marks appearing in a document. I can find all kinds of information telling me that I shouldn't have paragraph marks with no attached text, but nothing that tells me what happens if I do have them.>>

Shift + Enter is not the solution any more than Enter is. The reason you shouldn't insert empty paragraph markers is twofold: it's easier and more efficient to adjust paragraph spacing using the paragraph style's settings (space after or space before), and a paragraph should serve a functional role defined based on its content, not simply a spacing role.

The layout-related problem with using extra carriage returns to create spacing is that the software then treats this the same way it treats any paragraph, and reserves a line of blank space whether you want one or not; if that line falls at the start or end of the page, as often happens after several rounds of revision, you end up with unwanted empty space that must be removed manually after each round of revision. In contrast, defining this blank space in the paragraph style lets the software automatically decide whether it's necessary to display the space or (at the bottom of a page, for instance) whether it can not display it.
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References:
shift + enter option?: From: Michelle Anderson
Shift + enter option?: From: Geoff Hart

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