On Mon, Jun 28 2010, Wolfgang Schuster wrote:

Am 29.06.10 00:17, schrieb Jason Earl:

...

I am having a bit of a problem with some documents that I am trying to lay out in Context. The idea is that section contents are formatted in two columns, but in some cases Context leaves a huge space between the section header and the content.

I have included a sample context file (test.tex) and the output I get from running:

context test.tex

using the newest version of context minimals. I expect "1.2.1 Test SubSection 1" and "1.2.2 Test SubSection 2" to be on the same page as "Problem Header," but, as you can see, they aren't.

I appreciate any help in sorting this out.

I'm new to Context, and not particularly experienced in typesetting either, so if you have any other advice I would appreciate that too :).

You can force a page break before the second section with

\page \section{Problem Header}

to keep the header and the columns together.

Wolfgang

OK, that's embarrassing. I tried using \page[no] after the \section header, but it did not occur to me to put a manual break before the header. That worked perfectly. In my defense, part of the reason that I did not think of putting in a manual page break before the section is that my real context documents are generated from a script, and I did not want to have to process the output by hand to solve these sorts of problems. I was hoping for some sort of magic that I could put after every section heading that would make Context try harder to keep the content close to the header. However, while I don't pretend to be an expert at typesetting I do understand that automating this stuff is hard, and sometimes there is no real way to fix issues like this. If I have to do a little hand massaging of the output that's acceptable. Thanks for the help, Jason

On Mon, Jun 28 2010, Aditya Mahajan wrote:

On Mon, 28 Jun 2010, Jason Earl wrote:

...

In my defense, part of the reason that I did not think of putting in a manual page break before the section is that my real context documents are generated from a script, and I did not want to have to process the output by hand to solve these sorts of problems. I was hoping for some sort of magic that I could put after every section heading that would make Context try harder to keep the content close to the header.

However, while I don't pretend to be an expert at typesetting I do understand that automating this stuff is hard, and sometimes there is no real way to fix issues like this. If I have to do a little hand massaging of the output that's acceptable.

In an automated setup, you can try

\setuphead[section][before={\blank\testpage[4]}]

\testpage[n] tests if there is enough space to put n lines in the current page. If not, it insearts a pagebreak. Play around with n to see what gives best result.

Thank you so much. That looks like it is going to solve the most problematic spaces without having to manually insert page breaks. In fact, to my untutored eye even without playing with the numbers it looks perfect. That was precisely the magic I needed, and it even came with an explanation that should help me solve similar problems myself in the future. Thanks to Wolfgang for responding as well. I am sorry I was not more clear with my original report. Thanks again, Jason