Why does the spacing before a paragraph/heading disappear on a new page?

It happens no matter it's separated by hard page break, by option "page break before" or just by natural page break; it also doesn't matter what the style of content before these heading is. The before spacing of my heading on second page just disappeared, I find no way to bring it back. And, it only happens starting from 2nd page.

I know there are already a lot of topics about this in the Internet, but all of them were talking about very old version and some of options they mentioned are gone (like "Don't use HTML paragraph auto spacing", "Suppress extra line spacing at top of page", etc.). According to this question, this should be a bug and is supposed to be fixed in Word 2013. How every I still encounter this (showing hard page break):

As you can see I use 34pt before spacing for heading 1 to emphasis.

In Word 2013, if a style has Spacing Before larger than zero, the spacing is always suppressed on all pages except for the first in a section.

This has changed from older versions where the spacing displayed if the "Page break before" option was selected for the style, or if the paragraph was preceded by a manual page break (the behavior with page breaks could be controlled by a compatibility option).

To get the old behavior, you can save your file in Word 97–2003 format (*.doc).
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP
Volunteer Moderator
Note that MVPs do not work for Microsoft
MVP program: https://mvp.microsoft.com/
FAQ: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/page/faq

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Question Info

Last updated April 9, 2020 Views 5,062 Applies to: