How to draw everything on baseline grid without needing to crop top of images with text beside them

@Chris P. Bacon — I'm going to take one more swing at explanation here, and you're of course free to dismiss it and continue on your unique approach in this and several other threads. But I urge you to consider two basic points that you have consistently dismissed when several very experienced users (of both InDesign and publication layout techniques) have repeatedly tried to pass them along. Both are general, not specific to some micro-adjustment of one layout element.

First — this "perfect" layout you have expended a huge amount of effort and discussion on is, put simply, not achievable. An analogy would be trying to program a self-driving car not with the ability to drive itself, but with every micro-movement that will get it from Point A to Point B, with no feedback or intelligence or variation. Such an approach "should work perfectly"... but "can't possibly." The same is true of creating a perfectly programmed layout that will forevermore accept whatever content you drop into it and need not one tweak or adjustment. It can't be done, no matter how much ID's extensive power seems to promise that it can. "Just one more setting" is not going to fix the endless faults you're encountering as you move one corner only to find something else moved as well.

What you are straining to achieve basically cannot be done. Furthermore, it rarely is attempted, except in very, very fixed situations such as magazines and other rigidly formatted publication, where a company might spend thousands of man-hours to get to a "mostly" solution that will streamline — but not automate! — regular layout and production. But even then, this approach and its limited success is rarely used. I'd bet there are any number of very, very experienced ID/layout pros here who have never even attempted such a "master template." (I have, twice in about 25 years, but did so knowing the limitations and when to stop trying to make the template "perfect.")

The second point here is "Why." Why don't we all build "perfect" template layouts so that forevermore we can just dump new content into them and drink coffee the rest of the day? Because we know it can't really be done. So we don't waste time optimizing a slew of fine settings that will be largely irrelevant to the next story or layout or issue.

Both of which lead to the real point: we (experienced layout designers) don't use templates (at all, or at least not rigidly) and make selective use of model documents and pre-developed style sheets because we know, no matter how much effort has gone into them, no matter how "optimized" they are and no matter how strictly the publication format is to be maintained... a rapid, successful, polished outcome is going to depend far more on our overall skill set than on any "building block" or "preformatted" start.

Doing layouts like the one you are laboring over are a matter of starting with the right materials — and sure, a template document is a good thing to have when you do repeated layouts of the same kind — but then using a wide array of tools and knowledge to achieve a final result one tweak at a time, one experienced adjustment at a time, moving forward with the actual material and end result in mind, until that layout is done. Like driving, it's not a matter of doing exactly the same thing with each iteration, but using a whole set of skills to correct, correct, tweak, adjust, fit, nudge and bump the material into the desired end form. Continuous application of skill, not following some rigid plan or expecting the app to do so.

And we do it that way, we can do it that way, because we have mastery of all these features that you are struggling with as separate elements. We know what all of these settings and adjustments and variables do; an experienced designer can look at a layout flaw and instantly select the right tool and apply the right setting to fix the flaw. We don't need to spend days finding out that a feature exists, and then what its limitations are, and then how its several parameters interact to change the layout... we know. And we apply that knowledge from experience and learning, often without thinking about it any more deeply than a driver does while making a small correction to stay in a lane. And we're done with those few pages in an hour or so, and move on to the next task.

You will get farther, faster and with better preparation to become a skilled pro at page layout if you learn the basics, all the basics, all the generalities, all the methods and processes... before you dive three menus deep and then plead for help with six or seven parameters that affect how text fits at the top of a frame. You have, however, completely and strenuously rejected that approach, and have now spent weeks and thousands of words beating your head against a brick wall, with fifty narrow points of understanding that have not connected into a whole skill set that lets you solve the problems you keep encountering. Nor has it become clear that you are using a completely wrong approach that, at best, will take ten times as long to get you to a (flawed) degree of mastery.

The tool is not the task, and learning every setting on the tool won't give you much skill at the task of publication layout. Learn the elements of the task. Then learn the broad basics of how InDesign approaches that task. Then refine your understanding and skills by learning how each of these dozens of deep, very powerful capabilities lets you do one more layer of the task... even though you may only use five of them out of hundreds on any one project.

Stop trying to do nothing but master-level operations. Learn the basics, of both task and tool. It will be a far better use of your time and admirable dedication than trying to get all of us to tell you how to do one perfect job, point by point by point. You will get more useful help here if you bring your own basic understanding to the discussion.

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I am more than a little baffled at the depth of complexity and confusion in this thread.

This took me about ten minutes to set up from scratch:

...and as nearly as I can tell, it addresses every point the OP is concerned with. It uses three text styles, an object style, and adapts with perfect alignment to every adjustment made.

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I meant how to draw everything on document grid in the title, sorry for the error.

Hi @Chris P. Bacon 

If you have your text aligned to a baseline grid, you can’t align an image frame to the baseline grid and expect it to line up with the text’s cap height.

Here I have 9/14 text aligning with a 14pt baseline grid—the font’s 9pt cap height is at 6.1pts above the baseline, and 7.9pts below the baseline above. I would have to move the image frame in order to get it to align with the text’s cap height.

Set the first baseline offset of the text frames to Cap Height.

Making the text median height the same as the baseline height (just a tiny fraction bigger so it would force text in every second baseline) would actually eliminate the need of top cropping of images, and it would yield a slightly larger than usual, but acceptable leading, but there would still be 2 issues left:

- two small baseline height / document grid cell dimension, so I could not see the real number of blocks on the scale I am composing in

- extending the offset of elements below, if the number of lines in the column is even