Mysterious mid-scene added space in compile

Suddenly, mysteriously, breaks have begun appearing in the middle of scene when I compile my screenplay. The scene is not new, and for months I’ve been compiling without problems. But in the last week, in one particular scene, big chunks of whitespace are showing up on the PDF that aren’t there in the Scrivener file. They look like page breaks, but I don’t know how they could’ve gotten there.

The chunks show up in the middle of a dialogue shift from one character speaking to another (i.e. where the formatting goes from “dialogue” to “character”). I’ve tried deleting the transitions and putting them back. I tried copying the text into a new file. The corruption remains.

There can’t be anything in the compile instructions that would effect the middle of document, is there? I’m a longtime Scrivener user, and I know how to add and remove spaces and breaks between docs, but I can’t imagine how something like this pops up mid-scene.

Is there are way to see the underlying code on the page, so I can figure out what’s behind this?

Just an idea: if you compile the faulty document to epub and look at it in Sigil, you’ll see what is going on.

Thanks. I’ve never used epub or Sigil, but it might be worth a try.

In the meantime I deleted the problem area along with the text immediately before and after it. Then I rekeyed it all, and so far at least the problem seems to have gone away, but I’m not at all convinced it won’t come back.

Forgive me if this seems like a stupid question, no intention on my end to imply anything but, did you check your document with show invisible turned on ?
Perhaps you yourself (or whatever) accidentally inserted those page breaks…

No — actually that was one of the functions I was looking for but didn’t know what it was called or where it was hidden. Now I do, thanks!

Entirely possible I inserted them somehow…