ad hoc page breaks

[Ian Hodgson]

In my pdf output I have a few places where I want a line of text to appear at the top of the next page instead of the bottom of the current page. Sometimes this is a section level heading: 

And other times it's just normal text (which is sometimes bold as a kind of sub-section heading that is not an actual section level heading):

So I'm trying to do the equivalent of insert>page break in a normal word processor. I don't think a publisher style sheet is the way to go because that defines output for all elements of a given type. I'm trying to change the format for a few specific elements in the main content of my document. Is this possible?

Thanks.

Ian

[Bruce Cox]

Search for page break in the user documentation. There's a couple of XeLaTeXSpecials that are relevant.

Cheers, bruce

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[Hugh Paterson III]

I think one is pagebreak and the other is clearpage. 

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-Hugh

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[Matthew Lee]

I have created these subsection breaks as well.

I abused PC to get them at the left margin, but then they prefer to stick to previous text.

Since they aren't "real" headings, there's no clean way to keep with next. Sometimes you just want to set off a few sentences and a new numbered heading is too much. It would be helpful to have un-numbered subsection breaks in XLing that could appear anywhere under section1, section2, section3, appendix, etc.

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[Ian Hodgson]

Yes. Like you say, sometimes a new section level is too much. I have section level 5 headings that I set in the publisher style sheet to appear without a number, but since in some sections I only have up to section level 2 or 3, inserting another section level still gives me a number. 

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[Matthew Lee]

I realize that throwing in a random header goes against the structured document idea. We should really be adding a "whole" section.

Subsection could be a new element (under s1, s2, s3, appendix, etc) with it's own consistent title styling (I always want it bold, at the left margin, and the same size as the document text).

Maybe a more XLing friendly way would be to use a real section2, 3, or 4, but to mark it as minor. This way, it could be smaller, unnumbered and not show in the TOC.

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[XLingPaper]

Could those of you who have run into situations where you wanted to use one of these unnumbered sections/subsections provide us all with the reasoning behind it?  What is the use case?  What advantages does this have for the author?  What advantages does it have for the reader?

For me, anyway, it's not obvious why one would want to do something like this.

Thanks,

--Andy

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[Steve Marlett]

I have used un-numbered sections, because one should simply not have so many numbered section (bad appearance, not desired by book publishers, with good reason), although one always has to think about the other option of changing the divisions higher up in order to keep the numbers. 

I did them in XLingPaper as a kind of subsubsubsection that is then formatted to *not* be given a number and to not be included in the TOC or headers. 

This probably only works (or is needed) when the higher level sections have all been already used. But, indeed, I have used it. I set the style to include (as I recall) a bullet, bold face, italics … something like that.

—Steve 

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[XLingPaper]

Steve, do you mean that you used, say, section4 elements within section3 elements but set the publisher style sheet to not show a number for section4 elements and also set the contents element to only show up to, say, section3 elements?  If so, that's the intended design of XLingPaper.

I'm understanding the new request to be something different: it's an unnumbered section sometimes within a section2, say, and sometimes within a section4, perhaps.  That seems to be a whole different case.

Or am I not understanding?

--Andy

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[Matthew Lee]

I need this when I need visual structure on the page in a section but it doesn't make sense as separate entries in the TOC.

For example, if have a quick list of concepts with 1-2 paragraphs of description each, as in a review section, or most often when I want to divide up something visually in an appendix like lists of questions. The are screenshots from my thesis. In the appendix, I used the bold 'pc' trick and had to pay close attention to pagination. In the other screenshot, I abused the 'dl' item, but could not have done so if the descriptions had surpassed a paragraph.

We needed these un-numbered subsections VERY often when we were doing reviews or introductions in the Paratext manuals in xLp.

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[Steve Marlett]

You could use the PC trick (that is indeed what I have done) and started the content in the next paragraph (or paragraphs). I have done that and then had some examples etc. Wouldn’t that work for you?

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<Screenshot_20230130-180129.png><Screenshot_20230130-175818~2.png>

[Matthew Lee]

I've needed un-numbered subsections under s1, s2, s3 and especially in some appendices. In these cases, defining s4 style as unnumbered would only help inside an s3.

Basically, I use the 'pc' method when "normal" use would result in following sections only containing 1 or 2 paragraphs, or 4-5 sections on the same page. My committee hated that, but was OK with un-numbered dividers.

Personally, I'm asking for an unnumbered section that could appear under any level and be formatted independently, or a way to mark any specific section as minor, giving it a new format and removing it from numbering and the TOC.

-Matthew

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[XLingPaper]

On 1/30/2023 10:24 AM, Matthew Lee wrote:

I've needed un-numbered subsections under s1, s2, s3 and especially in some appendices. In these cases, defining s4 style as unnumbered would only help inside an s3.

Right.

Basically, I use the 'pc' method when "normal" use would result in following sections only containing 1 or 2 paragraphs, or 4-5 sections on the same page. My committee hated that, but was OK with un-numbered dividers.

Are you saying that what was logically or structurally many short "subsections" came out in a way that your committee did not like the appearance of?  That is, it made perfect sense to put these short pieces in a subsection with a title (because that it is what they were structurally or logically speaking), but your committee did not like the way that looked: too many numbered section titles in a short span of the document for their taste.  So you needed something else.  Further, sometimes these short subsections were within a section2 element, sometimes within a section3 element, etc.  Therefore you could not set all section3 elements to be unnumbered in the style sheet.

Personally, I'm asking for an unnumbered section that could appear under any level and be formatted independently, or a way to mark any specific section as minor, giving it a new format and removing it from numbering and the TOC.

On the first proposed solution, do you see any use case where these unnumbered subsections would need to be formatted differently depending on which section level they are within?  That is, if it's inside a section2, format it one way; if it's inside a section3 element, format it another way.

On the second proposal, the same question: do you see a use case for formatting these marked-as-minor section level elements needing different formatting depending on which level it is?  Is it going to be OK to format all instances of a given section level marked as minor in the same way throughout the document?

--Andy

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[Matthew Lee]

I tend to chop up texts finely as I write non-linearly, but my thesis committee would not accept:

• a x.1 section without a following x.2 section.
• a numbered section with less than 2 paragraphs of description.
• more than 3 levels of numbering.
  

In most cases, I was able to merge sections, and when I still did need rapid "subsections" in the thesis text, I most often chose to abuse the DL element instead of PC. I like the bold headword, and the fact that term and definition can't be separated, but I would have preferred that the titles were on their own lines.

As I mentioned from the PT guides (not a linguistic paper, I know), a short introduction or review sometimes visually needs dividers/signposts, but they would be misleading duplication in the TOC. I would imagine that this is relevant in Steve's work.

 

I've never needed more than one "subsection" style in anything I've done in Xling.  It would  be OK if subsections were limited to placement at the end of a section, as sections normally are.

As I said, these subsection headers are intended to break up paragraphs on the page, so the style doesn't need to vary.

Here's a more mundane example from a BT conference paper where I needed a right-aligned bold header to demonstrate a print layout, but a numbered heading would have been inappropriate. I would have preferred a that the titles stick to the list, rather than the preceding paragraph, but such is the PC.

Steve, can you show examples of using "the PC trick" in your publications?

~Matthew

[Ian Hodgson]

For me it was simply to break up the prose a bit, to help the reader follow an argument. So really, it is a sub-section, but definitely not always a sub-section I want numbered - sometimes just a sub-heading that demarcates the text is enough, without another sub-section number. I know you can turn section heading numbers off, but that's only for a specific section level/number across the whole XLP document. This didn't work for me because sometimes I wanted an un-numbered heading within a level 2 section, and sometimes within a level 5 section. So if I turned numbers off for section level 6 headings, that would only work for the sub-section below the level 5 section, but not for the sub-section within/below the level 2 section. And in this case, to make the sub-section a level 3 section would not seem right. That is, across chapters/level 1 sections, I have some kind of parity between the "size" or "weight" of level 2/3/4/5... sections. Sometimes my heading-ed paragraphs were not "big" enough (semantically within the flow of the argument) to warrant a new numbered sub-section.

Hope that makes some kind of sense.

Ian

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[Hugh Paterson III]

I'm trying to think how this would compile down to HTML without the subject headings... its like a span and a div.

- Hugh

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[Matthew Lee]

Hugh,

I see your concern. I had to look it up, but sections are currently exported from Xling to HTML as headings and strings of paragraphs that are children of the body, not as nested DIVs.

Adding something new that doesn't fit the nesting in XML won't hurt anything in the HTML, as it will get flattened like the rest.

~Matthew

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[Hugh Paterson III]

That's interesting, I had assumed that  there would be h1,h2,h3, etc. but these are not object oriented in the same way in HTML as they are in the xlingpaper xml are they.... so yeah it shouldn't be a problem. The issue is how do you continue an ol across two divs...

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[Matthew Lee]

Here's an example of a subsection from a Linguistics book I found last week. I was surprised that the titles were indented, but possibly the typesstter did that globally and broke it.

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[XLingPaper]

Thank you, everyone, for providing more feedback on this issue.

I've added a JIRA issue about it: https://jira.sil.org/browse/XLIN-190.  Here's what the description currently says:

---

Users are asking for a way to have a section level element be formatted in the output as, say, no number, bold title, no indent on a case-by-case basis.  That is do this formatting not for all such levels but only for ones so indicated within the parent section level.

This is especially useful in places where there are several short subsections and having them numbered and formatted as normal is considered to be unattractive.  These places are sometimes under one section level and sometimes under a different section level.  Therefore, they cannot use a publisher style sheet to set the formatting of a given level and get things to output in the desired manner.

Conceptually, these are still section level elements; it's all a matter of how some of them should be formatted.  Therefore using the current section levels makes sense - it's about how the output is to be done, not about what the logical structure is.

They also want to be able to exclude these subsections from the table of contents (at least usually).

Presumably these subsections will not have embedded subsections within them (especially since they are short).

Perhaps we could do this by something like the following:

1. Add an attribute to section level elements of "subsectionsAreShort" yes/no with a default of no.
2. Add an attribute to section level elements of "excludeShortSubsectionsFromContents" yes/no with a default of yes.
3. Add a new publisher style sheet element of shortSubsectionLayout which has the formatting information for these subsections (no matter the level they occur within), including how to format the secTitle element.
4. Add a Schematron warning when there are two or more subsections within a section level element set to have these short subsections.

The only change to the XXE appearance would be for the shortSubsectionLayout element in the Body Layout portion.  It would appear after the Level Six Section item.

---

Does this sound reasonable to you all?

--Andy

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