Nopagebreak nopagebreak nopagebreak - why won't LaTeX listen to me?

Question

Fun times, I'm making a (manual) index of the lecture slides for class (which are nowhere near latex, ppt files yay) and of course Latex insists on placing pagebreaks willie nillie through my items. Why isn't there a "keep (paragraph) with next (paragraph)" option like there is in Word 2007 (and all others I think). Is Word really more powerful than Latex [when it comes to this specific attribute of paragraph flow]?

*full page before here*
Knowledge in the \nopagebreak\\
\nopagebreak
\nopagebreak - Head

Results in

*full page*
Knowledge in the 
---8<--- Next page
- Head ... 

Yes, I know I can place a \newpage before the line to push it to the next page, but there has to [HAS TO] be a way to make Latex understand that this isn't what I want, these two lines are supposed to stick together!

Edit: Full context:

*empty line*
Knowledge in the \\
- Head \slid{44, 69}
- World \slid{5, \textbf{44}, 66, 69, 84}
*empty line*

With slid being:

\newcommand{\slid}[1]{\dotfill #1 \nopagebreak\\}

It seems to be to be that the -World line is pulling down the -Head line, if I add an empty line between them, both Knowledge.. and -Head stay on the same page, with -World on the next one. But when I combine the two, only -Head gets pulled to a new page, and Knowledge... stays on the previous page.

Answer 1

You could use a minipage environment or a \parbox. They won't be broken accross pages.

Further, LaTeX provides the \samepage command, which may be used as environment: \begin{samepage}...\end{samepage}. But I would not use samepage because it relies on setting penalties.

Also, the needspace packages comes often handy in such cases.

Answer 2

If "- Head -" is a normal text line \\* should work. If not we need to know what it is. In a lot of case solutions with \@afterheading can be used, e.g.:

\makeatletter 
\def\mynobreakpar{\par\nobreak\@afterheading} 
\def\mynobreakline{\par\nobreak\vspace{-\parskip}\@afterheading\noindent} 
\makeatother

Answer 3

You could also do this with samepage:

*full page before here*
\begin{samepage}
Knowledge in the \\

- Head
\end{samepage}

Answer 4

Alternately, use the needspace package. Before entering a bit where you absolutely need to have 48 points of vertical space (for example) put in \needspace{48pt}

Answer 5

Did you try \nopagebreak[4] ? As to the second part of your question

Is Word really more powerful than Latex?

There is absolutely no comparison to LaTeX. Word produces ugly, unstructured documents, crashes frequently, can eat your files and you have to recover, knows of no typographical rules and you have to pay a licence. As opposed to LaTeX it processes words rather than typesetting books, articles or other structured documents.