How to Fix Text Frames Reconnecting Automatically in Adobe InDesign

Forum|Forum|3 days ago
February 22, 2026
4 replies
119 views

Every reference I can find says you disconnect text frames by double-clicking one of their I/O ports.

This produces baffling behavior.

In my whole document, I have only two pages that are connected. If I double-click the connecting port on either page, content moves around but then the frames are reconnected. I have no idea what this thing is doing:

Correct answer rob day

Hi @Thomas_Calvin , Does it happen if you turn off Preferences>Type>Smart Text Reflow?

Barb Binder

Community Expert

@Thomas_Calvin and @rob day:

We can now only have one correct answer and Rob’s reply on Preferences was marked as correct.

I want to let you both know that I am going to unmark it, and mark Rob’s Smart Text Reflow reply as correct, and then will highlight his Preferences answer.

The idea behind the public forums is to leave a trail that will help other users with the same question and now the actual answer is buried in the thread. The behavior you showed was solved by disabling Smart Text Reflow (macOS and Windows). Only the macOS users will care about the InDesign > Preferences part of this, so the highlight will still help them.

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

rob day

Correct answer

Community Expert

Hi @Thomas_Calvin , Does it happen if you turn off Preferences>Type>Smart Text Reflow?

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Hi @Thomas_Calvin!

Hope you are doing well. That’s classic smart text reflow behavior. I use it for long document layout when all the content is in a series of threaded frames so that edits in the middle don’t result in overset text at the end, or empty pages at the end.

I wouldn’t use it with the way you have set up this document.

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

Barb Binder

Community Expert

@rob day So I spent the day compulsively checking the InDesign menu for Preferences during breaks in my FrameMaker class. It was there every time. I think rebuilding cache/prefs was the ticket. Thanks! 😊

(I clear them regularly so perhaps that’s why I haven’t seen this issue over the years.)

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

BobLevine

Community Expert

Seems like normal behavior. There is a sample script that is installed with InDesign called break frame. Use that.

Select the frame and double click it the script to run it.

T

Thomas_CalvinAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks. That’s how I broke the frames in the document in the first place. But you shouldn’t have to run a script to disconnect panes. If that’s true, the document is what, permanently ruined from the standpoint of InDesign by itself?

M

Manan Joshi

Community Expert

Does it happen with all files or only this particular file? If only this file then try exporting it to IDML and the resaving it back as INDD

-Manan