Control Where a Page Ends in a Built PDF

In the document builder you never place anything on a page. You write an ordered list of blocks and the layout decides where the sheets end. Most of the time it decides well. The rest of the time you have a heading stranded at the bottom of page two, or a single line sitting by itself on page five, and then it helps to know what the flow is actually doing.

A cursor starts at the top of the content box, which is the page minus its margins. Each block is measured, drawn where the cursor is, and moves the cursor down by its own height plus the gap it leaves behind. When a block does not fit in the room that is left, the page is finished and that block starts the next one.

Text is the flexible case. A paragraph, a heading or a list taller than the space remaining is split line by line, continuing at the top of the next page, and a block taller than an entire page runs across as many pages as it needs. Nothing falls off the bottom edge and nothing is silently dropped.

• An image is never split. If it does not fit in the space left it moves whole to the next page, and if it is taller than the content box it is shrunk to fit rather than cut in two.
• A table splits between rows, not through one. A row that will not fit starts the next page intact, unless it is taller than a whole page. A first row marked as a header is drawn again at the top of each continuation, unless you switch that off.
• A Spacing block can end a page by itself. If the gap you asked for runs past the bottom of the content box, the page ends there.

The Page break block draws nothing and does exactly one thing: everything after it starts on a new sheet. You add it from the same row of buttons as every other block and move it with the same arrows.

It is positional, not conditional. It always breaks, whether there was one line left on the page or twenty. That is usually what you want, and it is also why a forced break is fragile: add a sentence three blocks earlier and the break that used to tidy the document is now leaving half a page blank. Check the preview after any edit above a page break, not only after edits near it.

For documents assembled as pages rather than as flowing text, the setup pane also carries an explicit pages list, with controls to add a page, move one earlier or later, and delete one. Those act on the page sections you authored, not on the continuation pages the layout adds by itself.

There is no keep-with-next here, and it is better to say so plainly than to let you find out at the wrong moment. Nothing binds a heading to the paragraph below it. A single heading line needs only its own height of room, so if that much is left at the bottom of a page, the heading is drawn there and its paragraph begins the next one.

• Put a Page break above the heading. The bluntest fix and the most reliable, as long as you re-check it after editing anything higher up.
• Add a Spacing block above the heading. Often the better fix, because it pushes the heading over the boundary and improves the section start on every page where there was no problem.
• Cut a few words higher up. The cheapest fix, and the only one that adds nothing to the document in order to solve it.

There is no widow or orphan control either. A paragraph splits wherever the room runs out, so a document that overruns by one line ends with one line, a page number, and nothing else. It looks like a mistake, and from the reader's side it is indistinguishable from one.

Work through the cheap fixes first, because everything after the first step below changes the whole document in order to solve a problem on one page.

1. 1

   Edit the text

   Losing eight words somewhere in the last two pages is invisible to the reader and removes the stray page entirely. This is almost always the right answer and almost never the first one people try.

2. 2

   Shrink a Spacing block

   Two 24 point gaps cut to 12 give back 24 points, which is more than a full line of body text, and nobody will notice.

3. 3

   Change the margin preset

   Normal margins are 72 points on every edge, an inch. Narrow is 36 and wide is 108. Normal to narrow adds an inch of width and an inch of height to the content box on every page, which recovers several lines but visibly changes the document.

4. 4

   Drop the body size by a point

   Fourteen point to thirteen is barely visible and reflows everything. There is no global type size, so this means touching every paragraph block. Do it last.

One aggravating factor is worth naming. If page numbers are on in the 1 of 4 format, a stray final page is announced to every reader on every sheet. That is an argument for fixing the page, not for changing the format.

1. 1

   Build it as one flow first

   Write everything with no page breaks at all and let the layout paginate it. You cannot judge where a break belongs until you can see where the boundaries currently fall.

2. 2

   Read the preview for boundaries, not for typos

   Look only at what lands at the top and the bottom of each sheet. A heading at the bottom and a lone line at the end are what you are hunting for.

3. 3

   Fix from the top down

   Every fix moves everything after it, so working upward means solving the same page twice. Start at page one.

4. 4

   Add breaks last, then check them again

   A page break is the final adjustment rather than the first. Once one is in place, any edit above it needs another look at the preview.

If the finished document still needs rearranging as pages rather than as blocks, that is a job for after the export. The organize tool reorders and removes pages in the same browser tab, with nothing uploaded.