[docbook-apps] Controlling page breaks in pdf

["Gurra Green" <gurra_green at hotmail dot com>]

Hello!

I'm setting up an environment for creating user guides for a product at my 
company, switching from FrameMaker to DocBook. Unevitably, all (the few) 
good sides of FM are compared by my co-writers/fellow content authors 
whenever FM has a benefit. After all, the switch in work procedure is rather 
big.

This means that I have to point-mark a number of issues of the type "in 
FrameMaker I could do this, why can I not do this with DocBook? DocBook must 
be crap" (however, the resistance has been lower than I expected, much 
because FM is not a simple tool for the casual author either).

One of my current issues is controlling the way paragraphs are handled in 
relation to page breaks. In most cases it works fine as is, but for example 
I have a book with a section in a chapter, and the section starts with one 
header, one two-line sentence ending with a colon (:) and then an unordered 
list. I get a page break after the colon, before the first bullet. This has 
been considered Bad by the output jury.

I see two solutions; either insert a manual page break for the section, 
getting the header on top of the next side (but the <beginpage> did not do 
that as I discovered) or use some other mechanism to make the short 
paragraph stay with the bullet list and I expect the section header to 
follow the paragraph over to the next page in that case.

What is the list's opinions on this problem?

I use xsltproc/XEP to produce my pdf, docbook 4.2 and a thin customization 
layer with mostly parameter settings.

Best regards,
 G

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