How to prevent text re flow when adding a soft return?

[roberts33286217]

Example: I have a long paragraph of text in Indesign, the line breaks all look good except near the end of the paragraph I have the word 'He' that starts a new sentence but is at the end of a line, so I add a soft return to force the word 'He' onto the next line and Indesign takes it upon itself to reflow the entire paragraph making it look a complete mess. I could add a soft return at the end of every line to prevent the reflow but what a pain. Is there a setting I can disable to prevent the auto reflow?

[Jongware · Accepted solution]

roberts33286217  wrote

... Is there a setting I can disable to prevent the auto reflow?

No.

Imagine you enable this setting and then delete a phrase. Should the original line be forcibly justified with extremely large spaces? Answer: yes, per that "no reflow" setting.

Imagine you insert a phrase -- a long one. Should the text now become illegibly cramped up because the character spacing is a large negative number? Answer: yes, again per your "no reflow" setting.

But you are proposing the wrong solution!

If you want to keep two words together -- not breaking on the space in between -- then simply change that space to a non-breaking space. If you don't want to change the textual contents (for example, because this non-breaking space would also appear as such in exported text), you can select the two words and apply No Break.

Do note that these two solutions may not do "what (you think) you want" -- i.e., moving the two words to the start of the next line. Instead, they do "what you ask", that is, it will keep the two words together. If InDesign calculates that the best spacing is achieved by moving the second word to the end of the line above, it will do so.

In other words: if you do want your "He" to start on a next line, insert a paragraph return. If you only meant to keep it with the next word, use one of the methods above and let InDesign decide on the best paragraph spacing.

[roberts33286217]

In this case I had to add a soft return on every proceeding line for the best end result but your 'no break' solution will be my go-to in future. Thanks!