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List:       openoffice-users
Subject:    Re: [users] Re: conditional page breaks and non-breakable blocks -- formatting for books, like XyWri
From:       dave192 () burtonsys ! com
Date:       2003-03-06 23:15:54
Message-ID: sTmcBHvcwapi () burtonsys ! com
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tamar@thegranors.com (Tamar Granor) wrote:

> On Wed, 5 Mar 2003 22:05:42 -0600, RBE <rbe@flash.net> wrote:
>
> > I understand that styles can be used for this, but most often it's a
> > single paragraph (which, when made unbreakable, changes page breaks
> > further on) and really does not perform the same function.
>
> You don't have to create a new paragraph style for this. You can just
> apply the settings to a paragraph on-the-fly.
>
> I guess I don't understand what the original suggestion is looking for
> that's different than a paragraph that can't be broken across a page
> break.
>
> Tamar


A non-breakable paragraph is useful, to be sure, and I do
appreciate learning about that feature.  It will be helpful
to me.

But XyWrite's <NB>..<BB> (nonbreakable..breakable) and <NB nn>
(nonbreakable for nn lines) "nonbreakable block" tags were
much more flexible.  They could make a single paragraph
unbreakable, of course.  But they could also be used to control
page breaks over greater or lesser ranges.

They were not limited to a single paragraph: you could group
two or more closely related paragraphs (e.g., a descriptive
paragraph followed by an example), which you didn't want it
to separate.  Did you ever write, "as in the example below,"
and wonder whether the example would really be "below" once
the document was formatted?  Or contrast two very similar
examples which you wanted to appear one below the other on
the same page to make the contrast more obvious?  Or seek to
ensure that a one line subheading and the short single paragraph
that followed it appeared together on the same page?

Also, you could either use the <NB nn> tag or embed the closing
<BB> tag within the paragraph, or use the conditional page
break tag (break if past a certain point down the current
page), to get a sort of one-shot type of orphan control,
where you could pick where the page break would occur if it
was going to occur at all.

XyWrite had a very well thought out feature set, and and it was
many years ahead of its time in many respects.  Unfortunately,
XyWrite was written in assembler for small size and high speed.
That was a strategic mistake.  It made XyWrite small and fast.
But it also made it buggy and hard to maintain and update, and
its small size and high speed don't matter as much anymore now
that computers are 2 GHz w/ 512 MB RAM instead of 16 MHz w/
4 MB RAM.  (They are 100x faster with 100x as much memory and
100x as much disk space, as compared to 10 years ago -- just
as Gordon Moore prophesied.)

-Dave

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