Re: NB...BB blocks that did break and shouldn't

["Carl L. Distefano" CLDistefano@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to note from "N. Sivin"  Thu, 27 Mar 97 14:48:08 +0000

Nathan exuberates:

> It is always a pain in the neck to have a section heading fall at the end of
> a page. Tim's point is that you can use the NB command option that lets you
> specify the number of lines automatically kept together (e.g. NB3 for 3
> lines) within the style that sets up the heading, e.g. ≪SSH2,MD=BI, . .
> ..,NB3≫. The result is that H2 level headings will never appear as one of
> the last 2 lines on a page.
> 
> Enough of this chitchat--I'm going off to change my styles.

Nathan: Whoa! Before you run off and change all your styles, let's make
sure NBn works within styles. My initial tests (in Xy4) indicate it does
not; an embedded command is necessary. When you think of it, this makes
sense. A statement like NB3 (or NB=3) within a style is meaningless, or at
least anomalous in relation to what a style is intended to do. Styles
define text attributes that persist as long as the style is in effect. An
NBn statement, by contrast, is a one-shot deal: by definition, it affects
only the line in which the statement appears, and the next n lines. Putting
it in a style doesn't change its essential operation. If legal at all, it
would work once, presumably at the point where the Use Style command
appeared. Beyond the next n lines, it loses meaning. To use it again,
you'd presumably have to embed the US command again -- very unstylish! My
hunch is, you have to embed the NBn each time.

None of this detracts from the immense convenience of this usage.
Many thanks to Tim for pointing it out.

It's worth noting, also, that the PG (page-break) command similarly accepts
a numeric argument.  Thus,  would force a page break only if the
current page has 5 inches or more of text on it. One difference is that
while PG accepts various units of measure (, for example, works as
well as ), NB does not. "Its value," according to the XyWin
Reference Guide, "is always interpreted as lines of text."
 


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Carl Distefano * * * CLDistefano@xxxxxxxx
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