Continuous Page Text

Question

I have been asked by an editor to format a story I wrote into InDesign. Is there a way to put continuous text by adding it into a master page, or is it better to add the boxes one-by-one and use the pink plus to continue the text into the next page?

I'm trying to figure out the most efficient way to do this.

Thanks in advance.

Barb Binder · Accepted Answer

In addition to using primary frames on a master page, you have three flow options when you import a story from Word. Use any of these three techniques on the body pages:

Manual flow is the default—you have to click at the top of each column to place a column of text, then click the red + in the outport to reload the cursor, and repeat until you fill all the columns. It is the most work.
Semi-auto flow is slightly faster—Alt or Option click at the top of each column to place a column, and InDesign will click the red plus for you, automatically reloading the cursor.
Auto-flow is the fastest—Shift+click to flow the entire story automatically, through every single column on every single page, including adding new pages at the end if you didn't have enough.

When I demonstrate these text flows to my students, they always think that they are going to only use the last one because it's so quick (one Shift + click to place the entire story). But the other two are important for shorter documents and multi story documents where you want to be able to control exactly where the text is going – skipping a column, starting partway down a column, or skipping several pages.

~Barb

Derek Cross · Answer

You can select a Primary Text Frame when you create your InDesign document and use Shift when you Place the Word document into the InDesign document.

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