Wisdom about spacing content on a page

[Steve Rickaby]

At 14:49 -0700 2/12/10, Jim Duszynski wrote:

>I am working on a software User's Guide and desire to present the content in such a way that all the information or instruction that relates to a specific subject or task is grouped on the same page (without sacrificing appropriate white space). For example, instead of breaking a table across two pages, keep it on one page. The trouble is in some cases I end up with a large white space on the page before...
>
>I don't recollect any guidelines for presenting content in general. So I'd like to ask you for your thoughts on how you work with content format flow.  (Am I thinking to much about this?)

No Jim, you aren't ;-)

This is a generic problem with technical books and manuals, and is one of the areas in which we humble tech scribes are (almost) precipitated into the realms of art. Page balancing can be a nightmare, particularly if your content has a lot of tables or - worse - a lot of tables and figures. Generally short pages are seen as bad style; the publishers I work with won't accept textbooks, for example, with short pages.

As an overriding principle, a lot of white space, carefully used, gives a perception of quality to a page, unless it's an area where such a perception is inappropriate, such as military or aerospace work. The more you pack onto a page, the more difficult and challenging it is for the reader. I'm not a graphic designer, but I have read in more than one place that the art of laying out text well is more to do with the use of white space than of the text itself.

Klaus Daube has given you good advice, and at first glance his handout appears to be excellent and generous, but it's worth summarising the devices that FrameMaker offers that can help you with page balancing:

. Floating tables and/or anchored frames (as Klaus mentioned). If you have a lot of tables/figures and some are floated and some are not, things can get quite confusing for both you and FrameMaker, and numbered items can get out of sequence. If you float a table or a figure away from its context, try to ensure that the table/figure lies recto to the reference, i.e. 'See table X' on the left-hand page and Table X itself on the right-hand page, rather than vice-versa.

. Using the 'keep with' table row property (Table -> Row Format...).

. Redesigning your table to make it a different size or shape: tables can be fine-tuned for vertical leading by using the cell margin values of the paragraph styles in the table's cells.

. Placing two figures in the same anchored frame to 'lock' them together.

. Using the 'keep with' and 'start at top of page/column' paragraph attributes to move body text around..

. Using the 2-pt/negative leading invisible dummy paragraph hack to lock anchored frames containing figures to the top of a column or page.

. Using a multi-column layout on specific pages, with either a multi-column master page or a borderless table.

. Manually stretching the A-flow on a specific page to 'pop' a table, figure or paragraph onto it from the following page, such as a table that just won't fit. Unless a stretched page is gross, it's ten to one that a reader won't notice it. FrameMaker hangs onto these page overrides and honours them, but if you then optimize the same flow earlier in the chapter/document, what falls onto you stretched page may change.

. If all else fails, moving uncooperative content to an appendix ;-)

There may be more: it's Saturday and my brain is only partially engaged. Ultimately it's a case of 'suck it and see', bearing in mind that a pagination improvement on one page can mess up subsequent pages, so some iteration is inevitable. It's a bit of a game really, and it's wasted effort to attempt it until your content is stable.

HTH a bit

-- 
Steve