Space before paragraph (again)

[Groucho]

Yep, this is an old entry in my wish list. It's kind of rusty but still going.
Here it is:

I wish that space before paragraph create an additional space when a paragraph comes right after a break of any kind.

Easy, ain't it? Just a string of code or two to make a sad lad happy.
Come on!
Hey, people, it's Christmas time!

MCAAHNY to you all,
Henry.

[ptram]

Actually, additional space at the before a paragraph should (as per typographic tradition) be removed when the paragraph is at the beginning of the page. Is there a particular reason you would like to have it added?

Paolo

[Groucho]

Yes. I don't want a heading to be glued to the upper margin. You don't mind about space before in a publishing application, but then you work with text boxes, that NWP doesn't support. The only way to allow some room before a heading is by inserting an empty newline (i. e. return), which seems to me quite questionable a way.
Mellel has a tiny checkbox that allows you to choose whether space before should be considered or not after a break.

Greetings, Henry.

[Bob Stern]

Groucho, if you want to apply "space before" to a title that will not exceed one line, you can get the behavior you desire by assigning a large "line spacing" instead of paragraph spacing to the style.

(However, I agree with the others that the current behavior of "space before" is the preferred behavior stylistically. In fact, I consider it a bug that Nisus leaves extra space at the top of the page if the text has line spacing greater than 1.)

[Groucho]

Groucho, if you want to apply "space before" to a title that will not exceed one line, you can get the behavior you desire by assigning a large "line spacing"

Thanks, Bob. I may as well add a blank line or put the heading in a one-cell table, or type the heading in a graphics program and convert it into pdf. But these are all workarounds.
I, too, suppose that generally the current behavior is the favorite one. I'm just begging for a choice to do otherwise, not to compel reluctant people into my way.
As I said, Mellel does it the way I like, and so does Word, and Wordperfect, and OpenOffice, and NeoOffice, and StarOffice. NW, TextEdit and Pages don't.

Greetings, Henry.

[iota]

I agree with Groucho.

Please add at least the "option" for first lines after section breaks (or at the beginning of pages) to respect their "before" spacing. I find the before spacing essentially useless when I have documents with multiple sections (especially when mixing single and double column sections). If I want to set the spacing between two sections, I must do first add a blank line, set it's line height, and then adjust the spacing on the second line where the text starts to compensate what for the line height of the first line.

The text that once was the first line and didn't respect spacing is now the second line which DOES respect before spacing. This to me defeats the purpose of styles when I have to adjust them this way. I expect styles to behave consistently across the document and reduce my need to modify spacing for individual parts as much as possible.

Yes, there is a workaround with adding a blank line, but it feels like more of a kludge that makes my document feel inconsistently hacked together rather than styled.

I really like NWP, but this issue actually made me go back to iWork Pages to finish a document or two.

*** edit *** It turns out that Pages doesn't respect before spacing in first lines either! I thought I had done a previous document like this, but it turns out that Pages allows you to set margins for each section. In NWP I can modify the left and right margins palette but modifying top and bottom have no effect.