Errant paragraph and page breaks

[abnerbiel]

I have been an Indesign user on a daily basis for over 16 years and have never run into this before. Throughout the layout, numerous paragraphs act like a "Keep" option is forcing them onto the next page. I've changed Keep Options numerous times, made sure I was using the Simple Line Composer, and it wasn't set to align to grid.

One curious detail/clue is that even with "Keep Options" set to 2 lines at the end of paragraph, it will allow the last line of a paragraph to be alone but will often keep together 2 lines at the end of one paragraph with the first lines of the next paragraph. 

I think it's a product of imported styles from the master text document, but I cannot figure out how to correct it in Indesign. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

It's right in front of you, and you are not the first to be caught by this crummy little interface bug:

That setting is not controlled by the checkbox above, no matter how it looks. If you have a nonzero value in "Keep with Next __ lines" it will, well, keep with the next n lines. Such as "2."

Set it to zero, instead of the 2 you have.

[abnerbiel]

Thank you! This somehow escaped me all these years and, more importantly, it fixed it and is the correct answer! Have a great weekend! 

[SJRiegel]

with "Keep Options" set to 2 lines at the end of paragraph, it will allow the last line of a paragraph to be alone but will often keep together 2 lines at the end of one paragraph with the first lines of the next paragraph. 

That is exactly what you have asked for in the options you show. It keeps the last line of your paragraph with the next two lines (the start of the next paragraph)

If what you want is to not allow a single paragraph line to be by itself on the next page, try Keep Lines Together, and fill in the number of lines at the start and end of a paragraph that you want to have held together.

[abnerbiel]

As I said, that does not seem to be working 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

What result do you want? I see lines flowing properly in your second example, without the 'jump forward' gaps.

If what you want here is no gaps AND widow/orphan control (no single lines at top or bottom fo a column), you are going to have to adjust your text frame size and all paragraph spacing to optimize the layout. Using Baseline Grid is one approach but requires a lot of adjustment to get perfect results. And in the end, as with the above layout, some copyfitting/editing will probably be needed.

Or did you mean something else?

[abnerbiel]

Do you see the big jump from p37 to p38 in the second example? That, plus the odd behavior below where it says it keeps the first two lines of the graph together (but does not) are what I am trying to eradicate. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I think we're still talking about the same thing here. If you want your text to fill every page frame, top margin to bottom, AND preserve settings like "keep at least two lines together," it is going to take careful spacing and keep setup, and THEN it's likely to need editing and copyfitting — such as adjusted space around illustrations, or tucking in short paragraph lines — to get this combination.

It is simply not "automatic" for all text flow and keep and break to precisely fill pages, without widows/orphans, bad breaks, and (when InDesign tries its best and fails to please all the rules) things like that orphaned first line.

This is a sweeping subject needing a considerable amount of understanding of both page design and how ID implements all the various settings. There's no one magic checkbox or adjustment that will get you where you want to go.

[abnerbiel]

Sure, I have done daily book layouts for 16 years so I understand that it's not automatic to format the entire document and requires fine tuning. However, I have never seen a document like this, where the single line at the bottom of p14 does not follow the "Keep Options" to join the paragraph that it's a part of on p15 when there is nothing preventing that in the settings. It is almost like Indesign believes that some graphs are part of the graphs before or after.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Okay, it just seems like you want some contradictory things. Keep settings are not absolute; ID will break them when it can't do exactly what it's being asked to do. That's where you get the big page gaps, and orphans that won't group up, and such.

I can't be certain what's going on just from looking at your layout and one settings menu, but the only way that line can move to the next page is by leaving a gap at the bottom of the first. That seemed to be what you were objecting to in your first post.

I am looking at that illustration: is it exactly at the top margin? A hair's breadth of space there can and will fool ID into not following keep-with rules, even if it doesn't make sense. Bump the illo up a little until there is absolutely no gap at the top.

Text frames being just a hair off from the margins can do the same thing. Make sure your page frames are snapped right to the margins.

By the way, I have that documentary tape quoted in the header. Magnificent, forgotten piece of history/lore.

[Joel Cherney]

It really looks to me like the algorithm behind the Keep Options has to decide if it's going to push "Twenty minutes later..." to p 15, which would then push the last line of p 15 ("... there in 1956 from breast cancer") on to p 16. I guess it prefers widows to orphans? Or it prefers keeping the problems on a single spread to letting them cross into the next spread? But that is exactly what is preventing InDesign from honoring your Keep Options on the bottom of p 14. 

You could shrink your p 14 pullquote by a point or three, which would make ample space on p 15 for your Keep Options to be honored... and would also resolve an unnecessary runt and an awkward hyphenation, to boot. 

I do get that you are not looking for this design critique, but if you want to prevent the behavior you're seeing, I think it's what is called for. I can think of a bunch of other design-crit things to say, but no way to adjust InDesign's settings to get what you want (unless I'm allowed to be critical about your leading or paragraph spacing). 

[abnerbiel]

Thank you, that all makes sense and part of the issue is that across 350 pages, what works on this spread is going to break plenty of other spreads, but I'd love to hear your design critique! Be critical as much as you believe to be helpful. Thanks!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It sounds to me as if, despite your long experience, you haven't done any/many truly formal book layouts, ones without soft edges and 'slack' built into the design. When you move up to this level, and want a book to meet all rigid rules of text flow and layout, it can take as long to get the text fitted to the pages as everything else combined. The only approach is to use meticulous spacing definitions, usually use the baseline grid and accept its frustrating effects, and then work forward from page one, fixing each spread without regard to what's downstream... because you'll fix that next.

That is, trying to use arbitrary paragraph spacing and then working back and forth through a layout is a path to madness.

Start by choosing a base paragraph spacing — 12 to 14pt or so. Then define every paragraph using multiples of that. Then set the Baseline Grid to either that value, or half of it (there are arguments for both approaches). Then start fitting, using chapter ends as ending breaks between 'cascades.'

But making sure every text frame and every inset frame is precisely aligned with relevant margins will help avoid the maddening exceptions that nothing will seem to fix. That hairline of space fools the algorithms and makes ID do mad-robot things that make perfect sense to it. If you run into a glitch, immediately check the numeric positioning values for the affected frames.

[Joel Cherney]

The only approach is to use meticulous spacing definitions, usually use the baseline grid and accept its frustrating effects, and then work forward from page one, fixing each spread without regard to what's downstream... because you'll fix that next.

So! James is a Real Graphic Designer here, and I am not. So, I have a slightly different take. I'm a localization nerd - when someone translates your book into fifteen languages, I'm the guy who handles the layout. Quite often, my clients insist that the page count of the final docs remain the same as in English - which is kinda insane, because many languages get a lot longer in translation (120% - 150% of the character count of the English). The upshot of this is that I spend a lot more time than your typical designer in making copy fit where it really oughtn't. I never use the baseline grid. It may be best way to handle a single language, but it's not the right tool when you need 15 languages to have identical page-counts. 

So, let's take part of James' advice. First thing, I'd go through the whole document and ensure that all of the text frames laid on margins or guides. That's great advice, and also if you need to change your margins for the entire document from 0.5 inches to e.g. 0.495 inches, you'd want the text frames to snap to those margins.  Then I'd set the leading as James suggests, making sure everything was set at a multiple of the same number. Then, I'd make sure that I was dealing with a small number of threaded stories; sometimes it makes more sense to have one story for the whole book, other times one story for each chapter. 

Then, I'd set my keyboard leading increment to a very small number, like 0.1 points. I'd use alt-up-arrow and alt-down-arrow to make minute adjustments to leading. Each time I adjusted the leading on the whole story, I'd alt-pageup and alt-pagedown rapidly through all ~350 pages, taking 3-4 minutes each time to look at the whole document. If you spend twenty to thirty minutes doing this to your entire book, you will quickly find the "chokepoints" like your p14-p15 spread. Some spreads, hopefully most spreads, will look just fine by themselves; in others, InDesign will get caught in a corner, and start doing things to your layout that you have observed (not respecting Keep Options) or to which James alludes (that "mad robot" behavior). These are the places where I might change things radically. Like really wrong things; using tracking & character spacing & maybe even 99% character width to wrap a runt back up to the previous line, in order to make some space. Or...most people won't be able to tell if Chapter Eight is set exactly at 14.0 points of leading, when Chapter Seven was set at 13.9 points.  Or I might change the size of an image wrap, or the after-paragraph space on the body paragraph style for the whole document in order to get that one spread to fit correctly. That, of course, would lead to another whole-doc rapid review, to see if my new para settings fixed (or caused) any downstream problems, or induced any fresh problems upstream. I use Undo a great deal. 

I do this because I find it much faster than working in James' way. That's important to me, because I'm not doing one book, I'm doing three, or fifteen, or whatever.  On the other hand, his method never induces fresh layout problems in earlier pages upstream. I'm also often working with a constrained page count ("we've already paid the printer for the Russian you're working on, so it has to be under 350 pages" Well, $#!%, the Russian should be ~410 pages long, so I have to find ~60 pages of slack somwhere) 

But this method requires a whole lot of self-review, so you can find all the places in your layout where you have chokepoints. That half-hour of changing and reviewing to find all of the problem spreads is, in a project as large as yours, absolutely Time Well Spent. If it's your own writing, you can copy-edit to fit! I usually have to pay a translator's minimum charge to get 'em to edit copy to fit, so that is pretty much the last resort, for me and my workflow.