Provide as few paragraph styles as possible. A clearly written document doesn’t need many different styles.
Create styles only for tagging particular types of information (see Create styles semantically).
For all paragraph styles:
▪When configuring paragraph properties, add space before paragraphs rather than after paragraphs. If you mix space before and space after paragraphs, some authoring tools only use the larger space and ignore the smaller space. Other authoring tools sum up both spaces. In either case, the total distance between two paragraphs is hard to control due to the large number of possible combinations.
In practice, it’s not always possible to avoid having space after paragraphs in all cases, but at least try to avoid it if you can. This may save you a lot of trouble.
▪Don’t ignore the settings for orphan lines and widow lines.
If your authoring tool supports it, set orphan control and widow control to a value of 2 for all paragraph styles. Orphan control specifies the minimum number of lines in a paragraph before a page break. If the number of lines at the end of the page is less than the specified number of lines, the paragraph is automatically shifted to the next page.
Widow control specifies the minimum number of lines in a paragraph after a page break. If the number of lines at the beginning of the new page is less than the specified number of lines, the position of the break is automatically adjusted.
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