Apply text variable to two paragraph styles?

Forum|Forum|6 months ago
October 6, 2025
1 reply
145 views

I'm pretty sure the answer to my question is 'no', but I wonder how one might approach this?

I want to apply a running footer where the paragraph style "Head 1" displays on the footer. That works fine, but sometimes I need to force a page jump for the Head 1 text, so I created a paragraph style with the page jump and called it "Head 1 next pg." I want both of these Head 1 lines of text in my footer.

Let's say I have a chapter on planets. The first section is Mercury, and "mercury" shows in the footer until it encounters the next "Head 1" style, which is "Mars." Trouble is, Mars was landing at the bottom of the page, so I applied the Head 1 next pg" style to force it to the next page.

The problem is, only "Head 1" can be in the running header, so Mercury continues in the footer until I have a regular Head 1 header.

The way I see it, I only have 1 option: stop using the 'Head 1 next pg' paragraph style, and instead manually apply the 'next page' attribute in Keep Options.

Am I correct, or am I missing something? I thought using Character Styles as the variable was a potential solution, but that didn't work at all. Thank you for any insight and I'm sorry if this has been solved elsewhere, as I couldn't find it.

Correct answer Peter Kahrel

You're right: you can set just one style in a running-header/-footer text variable.

Is it not possible to set a Keep in the paragraph style?

Your idea of applying a character style to all instances of "Head 1" and "Head 1 next pg" is sound, I've used some variants of that a number of times and it always worked. It's not clear why that doesn't work for you. Can you post a document that shows the problem?

Peter Kahrel

Correct answer

Community Expert

You're right: you can set just one style in a running-header/-footer text variable.

Is it not possible to set a Keep in the paragraph style?

Your idea of applying a character style to all instances of "Head 1" and "Head 1 next pg" is sound, I've used some variants of that a number of times and it always worked. It's not clear why that doesn't work for you. Can you post a document that shows the problem?

V

Vic-MeowtoyouAuthor

Participant

Thank you so much for your reply! You were right -- I changed the Keep option for the Head 1 to "Keep with next 5 lines" and it looks like it'll be a workable solution. For some reason I've never had luck getting that "keep with xx lines" option to work before, but I guess I was using it wrong. (Bummer that 5 lines is the maximum though -- I'd prefer up to 10, since my doc has lots of footnotes and extra elements, so I'm trying to use white space to avoid all the clutter.) The Head 1 text is now jumping on its own, yay! I still need to tweak it in a few instances, like when it looks too cluttered when up against other graphic elements, but I can increase text wrap boundaries in the cases where that will work.

As for the Character Style variable not working, I tested it by creating the character style and applying the style to the Head 1 text (which consisted of several words). When I applied it as a variable in the footer, the result was what looked like hundreds of characters stacked atop one another in the footer. The bounding box for the footer is only one line tall, so the text wrapped atop itself and I couldn't read it or make sense of what was happening so assumed it had something to do with the style being applied to multiple characters? I don't know, but I immediately aborted that idea. I figured using the paragraph style would always be easier and cleaner anyway, so I didn't try to dig deeper into what was happening there. If you're interested, I can recreate it and post a pic if you want.

It's funny how, after so long using InDesign, there are still exciting things to learn. Thanks again!

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