How do I calculate beforeAutospacing?

Question

Hi all;

Ok, so I have the following in a doxument.xml:

 <w:spacing w:before="100" w:after="100" w:beforeAutospacing="1" w:afterAutospacing="1"/>

Reading the spec it says:

Specifies whether a consumer shall automatically determine the spacing before this paragraph based on its contents.
This automatic spacing shall match the spacing which would be applied to the paragraph in an HTML document where no explicit spacing before/after is specified.
If this attribute is specified, then any value in before or beforeLines is ignored, and the spacing is automatically determined by the consumer.

Now the "ignore before" part is clear.

But how am I supposed to determine what Word is doing for "a consumer shall automatically determine the spacing"? I'm trying to match the Word layout so I need to know what Word does in this case.

thanks - dave

Answer 1

Hi Dave

Thank you for the wait.

Here is what I found out, "Auto spacing is only applied between two neighboring paragraphs. In table here, there are no neighbors".

Answer 2

Hi David

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Open Specifications Support.

I found an answer from earlier post

It appears that if paragraph spacing is set to Auto and no layout option defaults have been changed with Word 2013 and later, then auto uses a default html-style spacing of 0em before and 1em after the paragraph.

If the layout option "Don't use HTML paragraph auto spacing" is checked, then the relative value is converted to 5 pts before and 10 pts after.

Additional References

(1) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/documentformat.openxml.wordprocessing.donotusehtmlparagraphautospacing(v=office.14).aspx

(2) http://webdesign.about.com/od/typemeasurements/qt/how-big-is-an-em.htm

(3) http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/creating/paragraphspacing.html

Answer 3

Hi HungChun;

Please take a look at ATE-4694.docx. For the paragraphs of text, it does look like 1 em spacing between (in this case 12 points). Thank you on this part.

But look at the text in the table. It does not have that spacing after each paragraph in the cell. But if the paragraphs in there are explicitly assigned 12 pts following, then you do get spacing.

Any idea what's going on here?

thanks - dave