After upgrade, some last lines in frame get pushed to next frame, others not, exact same formatting

Question

Hi!

I have a weird problem. I have a book that was made in CS5, everything was fine. I now work in the most recent version of Indesign and strange thigs start happening. Within the flow, sometimes InDesign acts like there is no space for the last line. But in most other cases, there is. Sometimes even within the same frame between two columns. It happens a LOT, so my whole formatting is scr!%ed.

The styling is the same for all text; both paragraph styling and text styling.
The text is Aligned To Baseline Grid
If I make the frame just a bit larger (draw the bottom border a bit lower), the text reappears into the frame again. However, images aligned to the frame will move too, so not ideal, plus I have 500+ pages.
The previous also proves that it is NOT a "keep" option matter, but a "ID thinks text does not fit on this line" feature/bug?!
There will be a blue # sign on the empty last line even thought it is NOT the end of the flow. What's with that?
If there is a newline after the line (end of pargaraph) this does happen WAY LESS then if the line continues in the next frame.

You would say that some letters in the font (same font as in CS5) is just a bit higher for some letters than others, but the point is, I really have to drag the bottom of the frame quite a few millimeters down, so that seems strange (and I have no clue if that is even a thing).

(paragraph has plenty of lines left in the next frame, it is NOT a keep setting)

Any idea why this is happening and how to prevent it?

QQleQ Dramaprodukties · Accepted Answer

I found the problem. The rogue #'s turn out to be empty footnotes. (That was not easy to find since they don't show up in layers, they are no separate objects and so you cannot select them.) My designer, 12 years ago, used the footnote numbering in the main text by creating empty footnotes. He did not use the Indesign footnotes themselves since they are far too limited for his design. So he used an anchored textbox for creating and styling the footnotes.

Now in the new Indesign those empty footnotes take up space, which they didn't in CS5. That's the blue # and that's why SOME columns/frames now have an empty last line and others don't: pushed to the next frame because of the space the empty footnote takes

But now I may have pinpointed the problem, I still have no solution. I've tried to create a zero height paragraph style for the footnotes. It doesn't work. it seems to be impossible to create a zeor height paragraph. (Is it?) I think I will have to convert each of all 178 footnotes over 15 files manually into an endnote and leave out the empty endnotes when converting to pdf. (Need to do that manually since "convert all footnotes to endnotes" always gives the same error: "There are no footnotes to convert. Check the selection and try again." no matter if I select all footnotes or all text or nothing at all.) I don't want to convert to manual numbering for obvious reasons: the risk it will go wrong.

You people any ideas? All my problems would be away if I could make the footnotes zero height but I don't think that is possible. Obviously manually converting all footnotes to endnotes is not something I am happy about, but I don't understand the error I am getting and Google gives nada on the error text. (Might be because I am translating from Dutch.)

I appreciate your thoughts.

Peter Spier · Answer

Unfortunately this is expected behavior when moving a document to a newer version. Text engines get updated and this can cause reflow.

The best thing you can do is use the Recompose All Stories command (Ctrl [Cmd] + Alt [Opt] + \) to force a recompose so you don't get a surprise down the road (putting a cursor in a text frame that was not already recomposed will cause that one to reflow which can cause major surprises late in editing stories that were not previously changed) and then go through the whole document looking for things that need to be fixed. This is one reason NOT to move a large project to a new version.

Your errant end of story marker sounds like you might have a second empty frame on the page, but without seeing the file one can only guess.

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