Betalogue

Apple’s Pages has the required basic options to keep parts of your document together. The “Keep lines together” and “Keep with following paragraph” options are available in the “More” pane in the Text Inspector, and can be incorporated into paragraph style definitions, like any other paragraph formatting option.

Unfortunately, in my experience, Pages is not completely reliable when it comes to applying these settings. In other words, on several occasions I have had paragraphs that had the “Keep with following paragraph” option on and still Pages would insert an automatic page break right after them.

As far as I can tell, this is some kind of basic flakiness in Pages’ page layout engine. In a similar situation in Microsoft Word, you can usually switch page view modes and this forces Word to repaginate. You can even find a “Repaginate” command in Word’s extensive list of commands that can be added to the interface through the “Customize…” command.

Pages does not have such a command, and I have tried various tricks to try and force Pages to “refresh” its pagination and take the “Keep” settings into account. You cannot switch view modes in Pages. So I tried pretending that I was going to print the document, and clicking on “Preview” instead to get Mac OS X to generate a PDF preview of the printed document and open it in the Preview application.

Unfortunately, this didn’t work and Pages still didn’t honour the “Keep” options properly.

Eventually, I found that one reliable way to get Pages to honour the options and properly paginate the document is to simply close it and open it again. Presumably, Pages does some fresh pagination calculations upon opening a document, and this seems to work as a way to force it to comply with the “Keep” options used in the text.

Of course, this kind of workaround shouldn’t be necessary in the first place, but what can you do?

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, September 21st, 2005 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Pages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.