Are paragraph ending marks ("pilcrow" symbols) necessary for page breaks?

[DSpider]

Something's been bothering me for a while now... Why do page breaks bave a paragraph ending mark at the end? Just curious. Wouldn't it be better (and more cleaner) if they didn't? I mean, section breaks don't have them, column breaks don't. What makes the page break so special? Do you think it's wise to delete the "¶" at the end?

PS: Using Word 2010...

[pdurrant]

It all depends on what you subsequently do with it.

I suspect that it's likely that you can delete the end of paragraph mark before page breaks. But if you post-processor doesn't like it, keep them in.

Originally Posted by DSpider

Why do page breaks bave a paragraph ending mark at the end? ... PS: Using Word 2010...

There is a setting in the preferences of Word that shows special characters. Turn that setting off and you won't see these symbols (although they still will be there and that's a good thing).

[DSpider]

Well, these are supposed to be non-printing characters, after all... And yes, you can obviously hide them. I was just wondering why the page break looks like this:

··················Page Break··················¶

...when column breaks and section breaks look like this:

············································Column Break·············································

I wonder how it affects text-to-speech, especially if the text is supposed to continue on the next page (ie. the next page starts with a lowercase letter, because the page break was inserted mid-sentence). Would I have to manually track down page breaks and remove the "¶" mark at the end?

Originally Posted by DSpider

...when column breaks and section breaks look like this:

············································Column Break·············································

Because text in a column can flow from the bottom of one column to the top of the next there is no paragraph break as would be for a page break?