Bottom border disappears from consecutive paragr

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We have bottom borders on styles Heading 2 through Heading 5. While I know it is likely not a best practice, there are occasions where I have a Heading 3 right after a Heading 2. The problem is that the bottom border disappears from the Heading 2. That is true of any paragraph where both contain a bottom border.

Is there any way around that other than putting a tiny empty paragraph between the two headings?

Thanks!!
Troy

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Just a thought…

Under Advanced Options, Layout Options, check the option for Don’t use HTML Paragraph Auto-spacing.

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I thought it might be possible to trick Word with a style separator (hidden paragraph), but that didn’t work and it might interfere with TOC functionality.

I think a no-bottom-border paragraph in between is the only solution — unless Word’s general behavior of ignoring intermediate bottom borders can be turned off.

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This can be done easily but it is very obscure.

You can add the border to every paragraph rather than just the end one if you select TWO paragraphs BEFORE modifying the style.

This enables you to see consecutive paragraphs in the Modify Styles > Format > Border dialog and hence you can specify a border between consecutive paragraphs. You don’t get this ability if you only select one paragraph before going to the same dialog.

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Andrew,
That was a great find!!

A couple of things:
1. I could not find any way to control the amount of space between the first consecutive heading and its corresponding bottom border. The settings in the Borders window seem to only apply to the last consecutive item.
2. I did find another workaround that just so happens to work for me (although it likely does not work for others). For some strange reason, the borders appear for contiguous items if the thickness of the border differs from one item to the next. For me the most often occurrence would be a Heading 2 followed by a Heading 3. We recently made changes so that Heading 2 uses a bottom border of 1.5 pt and Heading 3 uses a bottom border of 1.0 pt. We made similar differences in our other headings. This fixed the problem for us.

Thanks again!!
Troy

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