Page breaks are physically filling up the rest of the line

Question

Everything was fine until... something has changed recently where a page break used to just behave like a paragraph mark or formatting symbol. Now it physically fills the rest of the line on which it appears forcing everything else on that line to the left.

Page breaks used to behave like this... (edited image, since I DK how to make Word behave this way any more)

... like my section breaks still do...

Now things look like this...

So it looks like the page break is not just a mark - it's taking up physical space.
For left-aligned text, this is no big deal.
For centred or right-aligned text, it's a problem.

Pre-empting some questions...

"Just place the page break on its own line..."
When I have space at the end of a page, that's fine. However I often have content that takes up a whole page where I don't have room for the page break to sit on its own line...

"So if the page is full, why don't I just let the page break automatically?"
I may have future updates which change the length of that specific chapter, either shortening it or spilling over to the next page. In any case, I want to make sure I force a new page exactly where I want.

The main reason to just make it go back the way it was is that one of my documents is nearly 2000 pages long, with page breaks on most pages.

Thanks.

Answer 1

As an alternative to the page break that causes this problem, click in the first paragraph of the following page and turn on its paragraph setting for "Page break before" in the Line & Page Break tab of the Paragraph dialog. The document's layout won't change, but there won't be any visible page break to mess up the centered lines.

Answer 2

I tried this in the latest version of Microsoft 365 (Microsoft® Word for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2602 Build 16.0.19725.20058) 32-bit) and found that if I inserted a page break at the end of a paragraph with a runover line like this:

what I got was this:

If I deleted the paragraph mark at the end of the paragraph, I got the same results as you:

The only setting I can think of that might be a factor is an old Layout Option (what used to be called a Compatibility Option) that is available in current versions only if you open a document created in a (much) older version. At File | Options | Advanced: Layout options, see whether you have an option to "Split apart page break and paragraph mark." This setting is disabled by default in newer versions of Word, and the only way to enable it is to save in an older format (.doc). I'm not sure I understand exactly what it does, but it does change the relationship of the paragraph break and page break.

Interestingly, I tried the same experiment in Word 2010 (in a .docx), and I don't get the same results, so it may well be that this is a recently introduced bug. If that's the case, you should report it using Help | Feedback | Report a problem.

Answer 3

I began having this same issue last week.