Para. shading margin problems - top buffer, lines

Everything related to our flagship word processor.
Post Reply
stevenrowat
Posts: 74
Joined: 2012-02-20 11:48:49

Para. shading margin problems - top buffer, lines

Post by stevenrowat »

Hi,

I'm having a problem which I'll upload a screenshot of.

Description:
For one chapter of this book, I'm making a colored background with lines around it to hold my text. In other words a text box, but I'm not using text boxes because I want footnotes to work and I want all linking to work.

I color my background yellow and put a 1-point line around the paragraphs, without using the middle line, so I get a box around all the text on one page.
Looks good except:
Two problems with this:
1. I can offset the text horizontally from my bounding box line using the paragraph 'Padding', but when I use the vertical padding, it doesn't work at the top or bottom of a new page. The text hugs right up against the top of the bounding box line. Looks bad. Same at the bottom.
2. The bounding box lines sometimes appear at the top and bottom and sometimes they don't. They seem to disappear behind the document edge, but it's not consistent when they'll do this.

The first problem is the big one. How can I get more space at the top and bottom, so there's a buffer with my background between the text and the bounding box line?

See screenshot, which I hope I can get uploaded.
Screen shot 2013-01-25 at 4.17.44 PM.png
Screen shot 2013-01-25 at 4.17.44 PM.png (21.18 KiB) Viewed 12538 times
User avatar
martin
Official Nisus Person
Posts: 5227
Joined: 2002-07-11 17:14:10
Location: San Diego, CA
Contact:

Re: Para. shading margin problems - top buffer, lines

Post by martin »

stevenrowat wrote:1. I can offset the text horizontally from my bounding box line using the paragraph 'Padding', but when I use the vertical padding, it doesn't work at the top or bottom of a new page. The text hugs right up against the top of the bounding box line. Looks bad. Same at the bottom.
Make sure you have the same vertical padding applied to all paragraphs in the bordered region. You can do this by selecting all the paragraphs and adjusting the vertical padding en masse. I suspect one of your paragraphs (the last one on the page) has the padding set to zero.
2. The bounding box lines sometimes appear at the top and bottom and sometimes they don't. They seem to disappear behind the document edge, but it's not consistent when they'll do this.
Could you send me your test document or post it here? Hopefully I'll be able to observe the problem.

Hopefully that helps, though I might suggest you instead use page borders to accomplish this, since it sounds like that's what you want. Those borders can be controlled on a per-section basis, so you'd want to insert a section break at the end of page one.
stevenrowat
Posts: 74
Joined: 2012-02-20 11:48:49

Re: Para. shading margin problems - top buffer, lines

Post by stevenrowat »

martin wrote: Make sure you have the same vertical padding applied to all paragraphs in the bordered region. You can do this by selecting all the paragraphs and adjusting the vertical padding en masse. I suspect one of your paragraphs (the last one on the page) has the padding set to zero.
Hi Martin,

No, see the new upload. You can see in the paragraph Padding that I've done vertical for 30 points, and I did this by selecting paragraphs from the previous page right through onto the following page, so all paragraphs on the middle page have 30 point vertical.

All that happens is that the top line -- the paragraph border -- disappears, as does the bottom one. The padding doesn't happen. Unlike the horizontal padding, which as you can see works as I'd expect -- I get 30 points of buffer.

Hopefully that helps, though I might suggest you instead use page borders to accomplish this, since it sounds like that's what you want. Those borders can be controlled on a per-section basis, so you'd want to insert a section break at the end of page one.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'page borders', but I'll look into this.

Thanks
Screen shot 2013-01-25 at 5.04.59 PM.jpg
Screen shot 2013-01-25 at 5.04.59 PM.jpg (93.53 KiB) Viewed 12536 times
stevenrowat
Posts: 74
Joined: 2012-02-20 11:48:49

Re: Para. shading margin problems - top buffer, lines

Post by stevenrowat »

martin wrote:
Hopefully that helps, though I might suggest you instead use page borders to accomplish this, since it sounds like that's what you want. Those borders can be controlled on a per-section basis, so you'd want to insert a section break at the end of page one.
Hi Martin,

Page Borders indeed solves the edge line disappearing problem, but doesn't appear to do anything for the lack of the vertical padding working. See upload. Top and bottom lines exist now, but still the text is right up against the top and bottom.

Steven
Screen shot 2013-01-25 at 5.25.03 PM.png
Screen shot 2013-01-25 at 5.25.03 PM.png (88.48 KiB) Viewed 12536 times
User avatar
martin
Official Nisus Person
Posts: 5227
Joined: 2002-07-11 17:14:10
Location: San Diego, CA
Contact:

Re: Para. shading margin problems - top buffer, lines

Post by martin »

stevenrowat wrote:No, see the new upload. You can see in the paragraph Padding that I've done vertical for 30 points, and I did this by selecting paragraphs from the previous page right through onto the following page, so all paragraphs on the middle page have 30 point vertical.

All that happens is that the top line -- the paragraph border -- disappears, as does the bottom one. The padding doesn't happen. Unlike the horizontal padding, which as you can see works as I'd expect -- I get 30 points of buffer.
Can you please upload the RTF file? I just tried it and it works fine for me (see attached file).
Attachments
example.zrtf
(2.64 KiB) Downloaded 521 times
stevenrowat
Posts: 74
Joined: 2012-02-20 11:48:49

Re: Para. shading margin problems - top buffer, lines

Post by stevenrowat »

martin wrote: Can you please upload the RTF file? I just tried it and it works fine for me (see attached file).
I will if I must, but I don't think we're done with your example yet. :P
When I add a few more lines to your example (see my upload), so it flows onto the next page, I get exactly the same behavior. The vertical buffer disappears at the bottom of the first page and at the top of the second page.

Perhaps I wasn't clear: I'm working with a chapter, about 20 pages long. So about 20 pages of text has to flow from page to page. I can't create sections and break in the middle of paragraphs, with a new section for each page, if that's what you're suggesting.

It still looks to me like Nisus can't do this with the paragraph background. The vertical padding (buffer) disappears in your example file also.

Steven
Screen shot 2013-01-25 at 7.27.05 PM.png
Screen shot 2013-01-25 at 7.27.05 PM.png (55.28 KiB) Viewed 12532 times
User avatar
martin
Official Nisus Person
Posts: 5227
Joined: 2002-07-11 17:14:10
Location: San Diego, CA
Contact:

Re: Para. shading margin problems - top buffer, lines

Post by martin »

stevenrowat wrote:I will if I must, but I don't think we're done with your example yet. :P
Quite alright by me!
When I add a few more lines to your example (see my upload), so it flows onto the next page, I get exactly the same behavior. The vertical buffer disappears at the bottom of the first page and at the top of the second page.

Perhaps I wasn't clear: I'm working with a chapter, about 20 pages long. So about 20 pages of text has to flow from page to page. I can't create sections and break in the middle of paragraphs, with a new section for each page, if that's what you're suggesting.
Ah, I see. Sorry, I didn't understand that you wanted the boxes to appear on all 20 pages. That does change things, and I wouldn't have recommended section breaks for this task.

As it is, where the paragraph border edges and padding disappear for paragraphs straddling a page boundary, that's behaving as intended. Conceptually you can think of paragraph borders trying to form a single box around all adjacent paragraphs with the same settings. So for such a contiguous range of paragraphs, all with the same paragraph border settings, you should only ever see on top, left, bottom, and right edge, no matter how many pages those paragraphs occupy.

Let's go back to using page borders, which should be able to achieve the look you want. We can still rely on paragraph formatting to get the yellow background, but we'll add borders to the first document section. The only complication is getting that 30pt padding you want on all sides. The horizontal padding is easy, because you can that with paragraph rulers directly.

The vertical padding is a little more involved. The page borders features does have a position setting, which essentially adds padding/offset to the border, but it's unified: the vertical and horizontal padding are always the same. You can fiddle with the positioning settings and ruler to almost get what you're after, but the problem is that the background color isn't flush with the borders in all situations. See attached "bordered" and "bordered header".
bordered.zrtf
(2.74 KiB) Downloaded 531 times
bordered header.zrtf
(2.8 KiB) Downloaded 542 times
So that probably doesn't solve your problem, which leaves us out of elegant options. If you really needed to get this done, you could add a yellow box watermark image that happened to have exactly the right dimensions for your page:
watermark.zrtf
(3.19 KiB) Downloaded 537 times
But that's tedious to maintain.

Sorry we couldn't find something that works exactly right for you.
stevenrowat
Posts: 74
Joined: 2012-02-20 11:48:49

Re: Para. shading margin problems - top buffer, lines

Post by stevenrowat »

martin wrote: Sorry we couldn't find something that works exactly right for you.
Well, thank you for trying.

Before leaving this problem as unsolved, can I confirm with you that if I were to use text boxes -- say putting one on each of 20 pages -- and then flow my text through them, I could control the padding top and bottom, and the edge border, like I need?

I didn't try this because of needing about 4 footnotes in the 20 pages; but it occurs to me that I might be able to cludge up something with the footnotes that would satisfy me better than any of the alternatives so far.

SR
User avatar
martin
Official Nisus Person
Posts: 5227
Joined: 2002-07-11 17:14:10
Location: San Diego, CA
Contact:

Re: Para. shading margin problems - top buffer, lines

Post by martin »

stevenrowat wrote:Before leaving this problem as unsolved, can I confirm with you that if I were to use text boxes -- say putting one on each of 20 pages -- and then flow my text through them, I could control the padding top and bottom, and the edge border, like I need?
When you say "text boxes", do you mean floating text boxes? ie: those floating alongside text, drawn with the graphic tools? If so, that won't work because footnotes can't be placed inside floating text boxes.

However, if you just meant using the paragraph borders and shading to create the illusion of text boxes, that should work just fine. I'll attach an example here that uses page breaks to ensure the desired paragraphs show their bottom/top edges and padding. This example uses paragraph styles to enforce the boxed appearance, which of course is always a best practice.
Attachments
multipage.zrtf
(2.85 KiB) Downloaded 536 times
stevenrowat
Posts: 74
Joined: 2012-02-20 11:48:49

Re: Para. shading margin problems - top buffer, lines

Post by stevenrowat »

martin wrote:
stevenrowat wrote: I'll attach an example here that uses page breaks to ensure the desired paragraphs show their bottom/top edges and padding. This example uses paragraph styles to enforce the boxed appearance, which of course is always a best practice.
Hi,
No, see my upload. When I say a 20 page chapter with text flow, I mean that the text flows from page to page, across paragraphs. So it's not possible to put a page break in. When I flow the text across your example (see below), exactly the same thing happens to the top and bottom, they lose the padding.

This gave me another idea though. Wouldn't it theoretically be possible for me to simply put a yellow bground text box behind the text for each page? But with no text in it? And with the correct border line around it? Then the text could flow on top as much as it liked, with footnotes, etc.? Should that work?

Steven
Attachments
Screen shot 2013-01-28 at 6.23.42 PM.png
Screen shot 2013-01-28 at 6.23.42 PM.png (55.77 KiB) Viewed 12504 times
User avatar
martin
Official Nisus Person
Posts: 5227
Joined: 2002-07-11 17:14:10
Location: San Diego, CA
Contact:

Re: Para. shading margin problems - top buffer, lines

Post by martin »

stevenrowat wrote:Wouldn't it theoretically be possible for me to simply put a yellow bground text box behind the text for each page? But with no text in it? And with the correct border line around it? Then the text could flow on top as much as it liked, with footnotes, etc.? Should that work?
That should work, but honestly it sounds like a poor workaround for the following reasons:

1. You'd have to draw/position a rectangle on every page, which at ~20 pages is tedious.
2. If your document margins changed (or you want to change the borders/colors) you'd have to adjust all of the shapes.
3. It can be awkward to work when large shapes cover so much text, because they can absorb clicks (eg: clicks would select the shape instead of the document text).

I think applying a single watermark image to the first section (see example above) would be a much better solution than this.
Post Reply