Bug with paragraph styles

[EddieRobson]

Difficult one to explain, this. I'm using OOo 3.1.0 on Windows Vista.

I've set up a template for writing radio scripts. The company I'm writing for like dialogue to be laid out like this:

MAN:
What?

WOMAN:
I didn't say anything.

with names in caps and a line break after each line of dialogue. I set up a template which includes the styles NAME and DIALOGUE: NAME is automatically all in caps, when I hit Return the style changes to DIALOGUE which is lower-case and includes 0.2" of space below the para. Then when I hit Return, the style changes back to NAME.

The problem I've been having is this. When I create a new document with this template, everything works fine. But when I close it down and open it again, an odd thing happens: OOo includes a space of 0.2" after any new NAME text as well as DIALOGUE text. So it looks like this:

MAN:

What?

WOMAN:

I didn't say anything.

If I click on "Paragraph", suddenly the box for space after paras has 0.2" in it. But if I click on "Edit Paragraph Style", the 0.2" isn't there - and the existing text, written in earlier sessions, is unchanged. It's changing the setting for new paragraphs based on that style, rather than changing the style itself. I tried resetting it to 0.0", and that worked OK - but then when I next closed the document and re-opened, the DIALOGUE style had lost its space! It seems like the program wants both styles to be the same in terms of spacing, for some reason. The easiest way I found to get around it is to go back and work within text from an earlier session, as the style of text from earlier sessions is unchanged - and if I add lines between those bits of text, they behave as they're supposed to. It's only new text added at the end of the document that's problematic.

The problem seems to have started since I installed the new version of OOo. Can anyone account for this? Any more information needed?

[RGB]

Select the text and press Ctrl+M to erase any direct formatting.
It seems that some direct formatting is lurking in your template. Are you using italics/bold/underline/... and applying them "by hand"?
Sometimes, if you start "italics" with Ctrl+i and then end them again with Ctrl+i, Writer do not completely return to the paragraph format, and the following text is considered as having direct formatting. The only way 100% safe to end any direct formatting is with Ctrl+M.
If this is not a solution, a sample file showing the problem will be useful.

[EddieRobson]

Select the text and press Ctrl+M to erase any direct formatting.
It seems that some direct formatting is lurking in your template. Are you using italics/bold/underline/... and applying them "by hand"?
Sometimes, if you start "italics" with Ctrl+i and then end them again with Ctrl+i, Writer do not completely return to the paragraph format, and the following text is considered as having direct formatting. The only way 100% safe to end any direct formatting is with Ctrl+M.

Ah yes, that has worked. Thank you. I'm not sure where it's hiding in the template, as it doesn't appear until after the document has been saved and closed and opened again, but it's presumably in there somewhere (I have a similar template for other types of script which doesn't suffer the same problem). I'll try creating a new version of the template to see if I can eradicate it permanently. I'm not sure how it's cropped up, as I use very little "by hand" formatting in scripts - I apply bold to sluglines automatically, the rest is largely formatting-free.

Why is direct formatting creating this problem with the line spacing? I'm interested to know as it may help me avoid the same problem in future.