Word 2003. I thought I knew the trick but can't remember.

Can you prevent an empty line (paragraph break) from appearing in the first line of a page? (Yes, a good way of preventing that from happening is to use the "space after" in the paragraph formatting rather than inserting an empty paragraph. But there are pros and cons.)

Do you mean when you make a hard page break? If so, then no.

Can't offhand think of any convincing cons – inter-paragraph spacing should be controlled by styles, usually spiced up with a dash of Keep with next.

Isn't/wasn't there an issue when a paragraph with space before in the style ended up at the top of a page? I've seen it referred to in the helps for an Open/Libre Office compatibility setting, but don't remember which side of the fence it fell on. I don't have 2003 to check.

No, after a soft page break.

For example, let's say I have

• Paragraph A
• Empty paragraph (just for the purpose of making space between Para A and Para B)
• Paragraph B

If it so happens that the empty paragraph falls in the first line of a new page, it will leave too much white space at the beginning of that page. I was wondering if there was any option to suppressing something like that from happening.

I'm not sure either. It's been my habit for well over a decade.

I think what I didn't like about "space after" for the Normal style is that it affects so many other styles that don't need any space after the paragraph. Yes, you can certainly tweak each style so they don't follow the Normal style, but sometimes that's not what you always want. (For example, you may want to change the fonts in the entire document from Times New Roman to Calibri.)

Of the two evils, I think I chose to abandon "space after" and go with the more rudimentary "two paragraph breaks". Well, the only con of this method is this..

There are other "cons."

See 2.2 Why you should press Enter only once to end a paragraph

I base most of my body styles on the Body Text style which I do not base on normal. See also How styles in Microsoft Word cascade.

Well, all the other cons are silly. I think there is really only one con - the one I mention above.

using a separate "Body Text" style to prevent global changes when you modify the body text format sounds like a good idea! Maybe I'll try that.

That's why Word has before & after paragraph spacing, plus the ability to suppress before spacing after a page break.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

For my two cents, I never use Normal at all. Over thousands of documents, with a lot over 1,000 pages, there is not a single instance of Normal anywhere. None. ALL my styles are explicitly created.

Space-after is an essential part of well designed document structure.

I have Normal set to Courier, magenta just to make sure I weed it out when people send me documents I need to reformat …

Do you have the "default paragraph style" set to your body text style in the Options too?