Apologies if I've asked a similar question before under a different guise, but I'm still groping around for a good solution.
I want to implement running chapter headers with the running header suppressed on the first page of each chapter.
All chapter titles are formatted using the H1 style.
Not all chapters start on a new page. That's not too much of a problem because STYLEREF will pick up the last H1 style if I set it to search from the bottom of the page.
The real problem is that the document switches from one column to two column format within chapters, so there will be additional section breaks dotted about on pages that aren't the first page of a chapter. I therefore can't rely on using the "different first page" feature of Word headers to suppress the header on the first page of a chapter.
So far the best I've managed is to manually implement running header suppression on the first page of every chapter after the document has been written by manually adding an empty white text box over the running header on the first page of every chapter. However this is a chore and of course if I later edit the document (these are technical manuals and must evolve with the product they describe) the white text boxes shift if the pagination changes.
I've tried writing a VBA macro to automate this, by searching for pages with H1 style text on them and automatically generating the white text boxes, with the intention of running the macro after I've finished writing the document, but it isn't reliable. The macro fails to generate white boxes on pages where there doesn't seem to be any H1 text and I still have the problem of the white text boxes moving around if I later edit the document.
Is there really no better solution to this?
Regards,
Bruce Officer