Hide paragraph breaks at top of a new column

[samdisk]

Hi, I have a long text heavy document which I'm flowing across pages, which is in turn leaving a lot of new pages start with a paragraph break, making the first line of text actually start on the second. Is there some sort of setting or automated way to never allow this? For section header I have used Space Before and Space After to avoid using paragraph breaks, but that isn't feasible for the body copy which needs to have breaks in it.

Thanks,

Sam

[maxwithdax]

I am not sure why it is not feasible for the body copy. It is best practices for page layout to use "Space After" and not extra hard returns to separate your paragraphs. This will prevent you from having columns that start with paragraph breaks.

-Dax

[samdisk]

Because there is a large amount of text including many lists and other formatted sections and it will take too much time and effort to go through and change it all as applying Space After now will become a huge mess.

[winterm]

It is best practices for page layout to use "Space After" and not extra hard returns to separate your paragraphs.

Actually, it's the only acceptable practice due to several reasons, not only this one you're facing now. You did a newbie's mistake at the very start, and now there's no answer you might like. There's no method to magically hide those *unneeded* breaks, except manual removing. On the other hand, removing all double breaks using F/C is easy, and applying space before/after where needed shouldn't be a big problem if your Paragraph styles are organized correctly (are they?). Yes, it will require some additional adjustments, but this is the price to pay for not following the golden rule:

© Think finishing at the beginning.

[samdisk]

Thanks for the reply, the document wasn't set up by me but I did go through and add paragraph styles and space after to everything, a problem I'm facing now though is that I have bullet lists that I want to have no space after unless it's the last bullet, which requires me to make the paragraph style for them with no space after and then adding a paragraph break after the last one, which is giving me the same problem as in the beginning with some columns starting with a break. Very tedious stuff.

[Laubender]

Hi Sam,

what's your version of InDesign?

If CC 2019 a new feature could help:

New and enhanced features | Latest release of InDesign CC

Scroll down to:

Space between paragraph styles

Regards,

Uwe

[winterm · Accepted solution]

Or, if you’re not bold enough to use the newest version for important project, here’s tried and true GREP solution. You need two para styles for bullets: regular and with space after.

.\r(?!.)

​

[maxwithdax]

Great solution winterm​ - Gonna put that GREP into my library!

.\r(?!.)

================

. Any single character

\r Paragraph Break (Hard Return)

(?! Negative Lookahead Group

. Any single character

) End Negative Lookahead Group

=================

-Dax

[winterm]

In addition to maxwithdax's *decoded* expressions, maybe I should translate the logic to *human language* for some lurkers.

Find Format field is essential here. Regex looks for paragraph with body bullet style applied which is not followed by the paragraph in the same style (Negative Lookahead). In our case, that means effectively the last bulleted paragraph in the list.

This kind of workaround is needed because in GREP search we can't take into account more than one text style simultaneously, so we need to describe our query using just one style definition.

"Find style bullets followed by style body, and change bullets to bullets last line" is possible in scripting, but not in F/C GREP.

Notice body text style in my sample - it's absolutely irrelevant. GREP only cares about what it finds in Find Format field: is it body bullet style, or not?

[samdisk]

Great solution winterm, have ended up using that and it’s working fine.

Thanks for everyone’s input here, super helpful!

Cheera,

Sam