Best Practice for New Chapters?

[Hightime7898]

Hey folks,

Novice to InDesign (using it on Mac), used it a few times but just for fun. Working on a long(ish) book, about 120 pages and wanted to ask what is the best way for me to set up new chapters? Should I be using page breaks? I think it is bad practice to use a load of returns to get to a new page right? Or am I supposed to be setting it up in Paragraph Styles for the last para of each chapter or something? Not sure what to do and am starting out in the book so just want to get things right in the early setup. I've set up para and charatcer styles for the main text so it seems ok there, just wondering about how to deal with new chapters. Should I be using the Book Panel? I understand that that would make each chapter a separate file or something?

Appeciate any help.

Thank you.

[Willi Adelberger · Accepted solution]

Make for each chapter a separate INDD document (which is technically a chapter in InDesign terminology) and bundle them together kn an InDesign INDB book file.

Create a template with an oprening page and follow up page (based on master/parent). Work with proimary text frames.

[Hightime7898]

Thanks will look into book files.

[Scott Falkner · Accepted solution]

Use styles. Your chapter head can include a page break by forcing the paragraph to start on a new page, in a new text frame, or on the next odd or even page.

Use styles for everything, and create a base style to base all styles on. I usually have a “Body Copy” style that will be used for the bulk of my text. I base all other styles on that style so that changes to the base style will also affect the child styles. For example, the first paragraph in a new chapter might have no indent and use capitals for the first line. I’ll make a style called “1st ¶” based on Body Copy and only apply the formatting that changes. If I later change the font, size, or leading of Body Copy those changes will also appear in 1st ¶.

Oh, and DO NOT base any of the styles you create on [Basic Paragraph] and don’t use that style for anything.

[Hightime7898]

Yeah so I did come across the fact that we should use styles so I setup a few based on [No Paragraph Style], hopefully that is ok? I can easily change it if that is not the right option, I'm just working through this slowly to get an understanding of how to get this all set up.

Thanks for showing me the option of how to start a new paragraph for the chapter head. 

[Hightime7898]

Ok I setup the style to start the new chapter on the next odd page, so that is working fine. My question now is that when it does move that chapter to the next odd page, how do I get the text to start the first line, say, half way down the page because I don't want it to start right at the top since I have an image or something I want to place there? If I hit return to try and move the initial new chapter paragraph down, it sends it to the next right page since that style is still implemented so I can't use return it seems. Do you know what options I would have to change in order to get the first paragraph on the new chapter page to move further down the page?

Thanks.

[Scott Falkner]

You can add space after the chapter head in the Indents and Spacing section. If there is a graphic you can apply a text wrap to it which will force text to move according to the options in the Text Wrap panel. The advantage here is if hte graphics are of different size (or sometimes don’t appear) the spacing can be more consistent.

[Peter Spier]

Are you sayinf you want the heading to start partway down the page, or ithat you want a gap betwee the head and body text? If the former, you should probably create a special Parent Page for chapter starts with either a larger top margin or a large text frame top inset. If the latter you can add Space After to you  heading style, or Space Before to the style for the first paragraph, if it uses a style different from other body text (for example it omits an indent used elsewhere or sets the first line in bold or all small caps or uses a Drop Cap).

If you want both a lower head AND a gap, you need to do both things.