Thanks everyone for heir suggestions.  I have settled for now on this:  <br> <br>#+LATEX_HEADER: \usepackage[letterpaper]{geometry}<br>#+LATEX_HEADER: \geometry{verbose,tmargin=2.5cm,bmargin=2.5cm,lmargin=2cm,rmargin=2cm}%<br>
#+LATEX_HEADER: \usepackage{paralist}<br>#+LATEX_HEADER: \let\itemize\compactitem<br>#+LATEX_HEADER: \let\description\compactdesc<br>#+LATEX_HEADER: \let\enumerate\compactenum<br>#+LATEX_HEADER: \usepackage[small,compact,calcwidth]{titlesec}<br>
#+LATEX_HEADER: \titlespacing{\section}{0pt}{*1}{*0.2}<br>#+LATEX_HEADER: \titlespacing{\subsection}{5}{*0}{*0}<br>#+LATEX_HEADER: \titlespacing{\subsubsection}{10pt}{*0}{*0}<br>#+LATEX_HEADER: \usepackage{enumitem}<br><br>
which does a pretty good job of compressing the whitespace overall.  I&#39;d still love to do more finetuning of the formatting but I think that&#39;s a more complex project.  Unfortunately this seems to have broken mk4ht for me! which is a real drag as it&#39;s the only way I can reliably produce odt documents, which I need much ofthe time.  <br>
<br>Does anyone know whether numbering can be turned on just in some subheadings?  That would help me quite a bit...  <br><br>thanks thanks thanks for al lthe assistance,<br>matt<br><br>