Dear Members!

There is in the CSS specs an option for print layout named "page-break-before:
avoid"

This was introduced due to the fact that the web designer is unable to
anticipate the paper format the user may print upon. Also the display size
options of MSIE will propagate through to the printer, messing up page breaks
even more than other browsers.

The only program that implemented this feature independently from the W3C was
AMI Pro, bought once by Lotus, so it came to me during the OS/2 period. Later
Lotus renamed it Word Pro and retained this feature.

Most people will be unable to appreciate this feature.

Well, I started with punched cards about 30 years ago, so I have still the habit
of letting the machine do the work instead of doing everything manually the PC
hast taught generations of users.

The problem:

Most of the documents that went on paper were plain business letters, which have
several formal header parts, a number of paragraphs in the body, and several
formal trailer parts, at least the "Kind regards" or similar above the
signature, bureaucratic formalism may call for a couple of trailer parts more.

Perhaps I am that idiosyncratic, but even with the typewriter, I managed to get
my letters exactly that long, that the "Kind regards" had to be queezed in the
bottom margin.

On the computer, this got orphaned on the final page.

Aye, DOS-Word 4.0, 5.0, 5.5, and Winword 2.0a allowed me to switch between
different print layout templates twiddling with margins.

Also they allowed the "Standard" paragraph format to be cloned and a
"page-break-after: avoid" added.

As pointed out above, this is a nuisance to me.

A "page-break-before: avoid" can be put into the document template, thus the
need for a manual afterwork is eliminated, and even paper and ink saved when
this formatting error has made it onto paper which is quite likely especially
under time pressure and other stuff in a busy office.

Thus "page-break-before:avoid" became to me the killer feature of Lotus Word
Pro. I hope they haven't patented this.

OOo lacks the "page-break-before: avoid" because it started out as an MS-Office
clone.

MS-Office, however, never implemented it, despite my complaints at the
registration of DOS-Word 4.0.

Instead, having seen lots of versions on various business computers, their
Usability Lab is toddlerising the users increasingly with every version,
breaking the habits of experienced users with every new version, eliminating
functions from main and right-click menus, moving them to little known mouse
gestures, you can't even use the keyboard shortcut available in Explorer's
details view.

So the feature suggested here will appreciate concerning users, as should be
more numerous with OOo than with any other software, with the exception of Word
Perfect and LaTeX/TeX, their users had the option to put a "page-break: avoid"
/between/ paragraphs, which could go into their document templates.

To advertise this feature, the letter document templates should have
preformatted their trailer components with "page-break-before: avoid" and this
should be advertised in the help and tips as well.

Increasing numbers of OOo users getting used to this way of automation will have
fun letting MS-Office users in the dust, that may generate quite a number of
flame wars in the appropriate forums.

Kind regards /*"page-break-before:avoid"*/

Norbert Grün /*"page-break-before:avoid"*/