answers to some common questions about styles

Does your scheme really work?

Yes: pre-production editing is much reduced, for author and publisher alike.

No: occasional exceptions need to be manually resolved during final layout.

Do you really mean 'No page breaks'? How else can you force a page break to be in the correct place?

Yes, you don't need any hard page breaks. The page break is in the style for chapter headings, usually 'Heading 2'.

No empty lines? What about ones between one section and the next? The only time this line isn't 'empty' is if it occurs at the foot of a page.

You can use styles for this too. The point is you can't predict where the foot of a page will be when the document reflows during setup for the final font, paper size and margins.

At section changes shown by extra white space, the last paragraph needs to have a different style with additional space after, thus avoiding the possibility of redundant white space at the top of a new page.

At section changes shown by a visible separator like * * * the last paragraph in the section has a style which includes 'keep with next' to avoid the possibility of the separator appearing at the top of a new page. The separator has its own style, defining the spacing.

Since normal is indented, it must know where to indent to. Surely you have to have a tab stop?

No. The setting for first line indent is independent of tab setting. First line indents should not be set by pressing the tab key because it makes adjusting the first line indent for the whole document difficult.