Why am I losing page and column breaks?

[Stuart Rogers]

Natalie Bircher wrote:
> First, I apologize for my knee-jerk response...to Stuart and all of you.

Oh all right then, since we've both apologized, I won't keep to myself 
after all.  (We're in the middle of an election campaign in Ontario, so 
making promises that won't be kept is the sport-du-jour anyway ;-)

I accept your apology.

> 
> I really, truly had no idea what type of information you would need to
> answer such a question. A polite request for that information would have
> been appropriate, and appreciated.

Well, for hints on how to pose future questions, I suggest you just have 
a look through the archives, or simply read the posts from others that 
will appear in the interim.  The ones that got or will get the fastest, 
most accurate responses are good examples of well-described situations 
and clearly stated problems.

People tell us what their layout is (side-heads or no, multiple master 
pages or no, etc.), what the problem page consists of ("a big table that 
continues overleaf"), what happened immediately before the problem 
occurred (updated the book, imported a text inset, re-opened a file 
saved on a server, etc.), and any other details that make the situation 
unusual (or not).  And of course, as I mentioned before, your OS and FM 
version are important because in many cases the answer is dead simple: 
such-and-such a version of FM for Windoze has a known bug, and here's 
the work-around.

For your own situation, you might have told us about your page layout 
(number of columns, feathered/balanced, proximity to straddling 
paragraphs), whether the problem occurred on every page/column or just 
in certain circumstances, the characteristics of the tags on affected 
paragraphs, how the breaks were applied in the first place, what you did 
that seemed to cause them to fail, and so on.  Think about how you quiz 
your SMEs when you're researching for your documentation, and you will 
have put yourself in the shoes of framers who need information from you 
in order to help.  Too much information is better than too little, and 
much better than none.

Best regards,

-- 
Stuart Rogers
Technical Communicator
Phoenix Geophysics Limited
Toronto, ON, Canada
+1 (416) 491-7340 x 325

srogers phoenix-geophysics com

"On the contrary."
-- Henrik Ibsen (last words, after a nurse said he "seemed a little 
better.")