When viewed in Print layout there is about a half page gap at the beggining of a new page. In the paragraph section all the boxes in Line and Page breaks are blank. I also eliminated any ^p^p with ^p.
There is a hidden dotted line (at the end of the page and before the blank section on the next page) that is shown only in draft mode (page line).

If you post a document with the problem I'm sure it will be easy enough to diagnose.

Things to check include:
Are there tracked revisions in the file? If so, make sure you can see the deleted content
Select the first paragraph on the page - what are its paragraph settings for space above or below?
Is there something in the header with text wrapping turned on? This could include white boxes.
Is the section setup set to align top or align middle?

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

I have attached the segment of the file with the gap between first and second page. The original text was wider and looked OK and the issue appeared when I tried to reformat it to a 9 x 6 inch page size.

Attached Files

MEMOIRS segment.docx (26.0 KB, 2 views)

Hi, Constantine,

I am a big fan of the "Reveal Formatting" pane (SHIFT+F1). As you see, looking at that told me where your issue was.

To fix it, on the Layout tab, expand the Page Setup and on the resulting window, click on the third tab, Layout. I'm not completely sure what effect you're looking for, but I changed the "odd page" to Continuous and the vertical alignment to Top and all looks right to me. I see your paper size is showing up as 6" by 9" (you may be metric, but that's how it shows to me); is that correct?

-- Ann

Attached Images

image-1.jpg (176.0 KB, 14 views)

Thanks to kilroyscarnival for pointing to the solution and to Guessed for suggesting I include a file as this is my first posting in the forum.

It turns out changing the vertical alignment to Top did the trick. I have no idea why it was set to bottom. I should say that the original text was written in Greek around 1985 using PCwrite that was very popular before MS Word dominated. Perhaps this may have something to do with the strange setting when the text file was imported to Word. Plus there was a machine translation from Greek to English. Now I can continue the editing process.

Regarding the page size, 6 x9 inches is the most typical book size, at least in the US. The nearest standard size is C5

no new posting meant

I'm glad you got it sorted. Thanks for letting us know.

Word has poor support for vertical alignment. "Top" is really the only useful option. :-)

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional