Block protect (Keep last line of paragraph with next paragraph)
- by Ed Cottrell
Is there a way to force Microsoft Word 2010 to keep the last line of a paragraph with the next paragraph?
An example of when this is relevant is when starting a block quote; it doesn't look good to have the block quote start at the top of a new page, particularly when it's introduced by a partial sentence, like this:
"Lorem ipsum" is sample text widely used in the publishing industry, as the
text has spacing roughly similar to that of English and therefore looks
"normal" but unintelligible to an English reader's eye, allowing the reader
to focus on design elements. It begins,
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam
rhoncus laoreet risus, quis congue leo viverra congue.
Suspendisse magna massa, viverra imperdiet est eu, ultrices
volutpat lectus. Sed pulvinar est id risus lobortis venenatis.
There shouldn't be a page break after "begins," because it looks like the sentence ends abruptly.
"Keep lines together" won't work, because by definition we're talking about two paragraphs. "Keep with next" won't work if the first paragraph is larger than a couple of lines, because then you get an awkwardly large space at the bottom of a page. Manual line breaks obviously work, but only when the document is final, which is often less certain than it seems.
I know WordPerfect has a feature called "block protect" that does this, but I have not found even an acceptable substitute in Word. I have played with style separators and hidden paragraph breaks, but to no avail.
I would love a special character, kind of like the nonbreaking space or zero width optional space, that tells Word to move to the next page if the next paragraph would otherwise start the page. A macro would also be great, but I haven't been able to find a starting point (like how to detect where non-manual page breaks fall).
Edit: It looks like "Keep with next" works this way in Word 2013, but I specifically need a fix that works in Word 2010.
