Re: How to: get TeX to warn me when it breaks a chunk of text over pages.

[John Culleton <john@wexfordpress.com>]

On Friday 08 March 2002 05:57, Daniel Pittman wrote:
> As part of writing the recipe book that I am working on I want
> to achieve something a bit non-standard in terms of TeX page
> breaking.
>
> Because the book is intended to be sitting on the bench and
> read while I am in the middle of cooking, breaking a recipe
> over a page boundary is a /very/ undesirable thing to do.
>
> I would rather have (and have to fill) whitespace on the page
> than a page break in the middle of a recipe.
>
>
> Now, I don't think that I can get TeX to do much of the work
> of ordering recipes for me to automatically fill the space
> optimally, at least not if I want to be able to have recipes
> that are longer than a single page.
>
> I tried placing each recipe in a float which solved the page
> break issue tolerably but cut of recipes that extended longer
> than a single page -- without a warning or error. :/
>
>
> I don't mind having to go through and manually paginate in
> places and to reorder recipes to achieve the layout that I
> want. Having TeX do some or all of this would be nice but...
>
>
> What would be great would be to be able to discourage page
> breaking within the recipe and to have TeX warn me when it
> does break within the bounds of the recipe.
>
>
> I don't know how on-topic this is for the list but I hope that
> someone can help me.
>
> Thanks,
>         Daniel

The traditional way of handling this is the \filbreak command. It
says in effect ``break the page here unless there is room for 
the next chunk of text followed by a \filbreak command.'' See
the TeXBook page 111. Thst fits your recipe situation perfectly.

Now I don't know what the interaction is between \filbreak and
Context. You may have to retreat to pdftex, but probably not. 

This will work more reliably than floats. 

John Culleton