> …”space before” is not supressed at the top of a new page…

In fact, there is a compatibility option to do this in that same dialog.

Regarding Exactly and At Least, you can only choose one. If your line numbers were created in the header using Exactly, then the At Least wouldn’t line up with them. If they were created with Single spacing, however, then it would line up better than Exactly.

But you should not need Space Before on every style, only on the ones that need to be single-spaced internally, such as the argument headings. I’m not sure when you need Space After.

So… if you stick with all Exactly heights, the ones that double space internally, such as body paragraphs, could be 24 pt with no Space Before and no Space After; the ones that are single spaced internally, such as argument headings, would be 12 pt Line Height with 12 pt Space Before. Turn on the option to suppress blank lines at the top of pages, but turn off the Don’t center option. Does this get all the way there? If not, tell your lawyers they’ll need to finish a few hours early so it can all be typed by hand on a manual typewriter, pursuant to the latest court rules.

sorry it took a couple of days to get back, but if you’re still toying with this…

i was able to re-create a pleading document in which the text began appearing above the margin at the top of the document as you described. And the culprit was–the Tools | Options | Compatibility option titled “Suppress extra line spacing at top of page”. It appears that this option suppresses too much extra line spacing when the other compatibility option is set to “Don’t center…”.

I also looked at how our California pleading template was set up–and it is set up with a text box with exact line height set to 23.5 and a font size of 13; the text in the pleading itself is set to a font size of 13 with exact line height of 23.5, except that a single-spaced style is set up with exact line height of 11.75. (i’m told that this is the specific rule in California (but i’m not a lawyer), except that some courts require a 14 point font size). the only option selected in Tools | Options | Compatibility is set to “Don’t center.” (NOTE: the text box must be set to have no internal spacing between the edges of the text box and the actual text inside the text box).

Finally, I simply ran a MS Word pleading template to see what it’s defaults were! And, Word’s pleading template produces a document with double-spaced styles specifying an exact line height of 25.4 with single-spaced styles having an exact line height of 12.7. I think these point sizes are chosen instead of 24/12 points to allow for leading between lines of text. More interesting, the MS Word pleading template produces a Compatibility set that selects three items: (1) the “Don’t Center” option; (2) “Adjust line height to grid height in the table” (i have no idea what that does!) and (3) “Suppress extra line spacing at BOTTOM of page” (to avoid having the blank space under the text on the last line of a page causing the entire line to skip to the next page–which should help you out on meeting your page limitations).

nonetheless, NOTE that all text in these documents ONLY use exact line heights with particular attention to using exactly the exact line height of the pleading line numbers (or half that to simulate single-spacing). This, in turn, requires that users do not copy the formatting of non-pleading text into a pleading (lest the pasted text comes into the document with double or single spacing instead of exact-line spacing). Since most people will not be able to adhere to the law (thou shalt only use exact line spacing paragraph formatting), you would probably need to have a macro that you could run when you’re finished with the pleading that would scan through a document and change the formatting of any single- or double-spaced paragraph to be replaced with the appropriate exact line height dimension. If you go this route, post back and I or someone else could help you with creating such a macro.

hopefully, this will be easier than trying to directly apply space-before and space-after. HOWEVER (and sorry if this is all too discouraging), since pleadings often contain footnotes–you should be advised that tinkering with line spacing, line height, space-before and space-after settings EXCEPT WITHIN THE DEFINITIONS OF PARAGRAPH STYLES will invariably cause footnotes to start appearing on the wrong pages, at least in Word 97 and Word 2000. (i can’t think of a macro approach that would correct any exceptions to this rule). And since pleadings often contain footnotes, this further demonstrates the ugliness of using Word in legal settings.

Oh, the wonders of market share…

in any case, hope this helps!