I'm impossible to disconnect text frames?

Forum|Forum|20 hours ago
February 22, 2026
4 replies
63 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

T

Thomas_CalvinAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks, Barb, but I didn’t set it up this way. I just discovered that these two frames are connected, and no others in the entire document.

As it turns out, “Smart Text Reflow” was the problem, but I had no way to turn it off because the Preferences menu usually doesn’t exist. Also… there are settings scattered all over the place. You have the Preferences menu, but then the “User Settings” and “Document Setup.”

One would expect this option to be document-specific. For some types of documents (like the one I’m working on), it’s not permissible to have unexpected pagination. Every page of some of our manuals is approved by a regulatory agency one at a time. For other manuals this is not true. Therefore we would turn off reflow for specific manuals.

Look at this nonsense:

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