Is it best not to use page breaks?

[Thomas_Calvin]

It seems to me that hard-coding page breaks in your text is a bad idea. If you publish your document in a different format, it's going to be a mess.

Wouldn't it be better to adjust page breaks by resizing the text frame and forcing the story to flow onto the next page where you want it to?

Or is there some other strategy people employ when they want to deploy to different-sized media?

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

IMO, resizing frames can cause more problems than it solves, especially if the text ever has to reflow. 

I don't like manual page breaks either. I build based-on paragraph styles with breaks built in.

For example:

Heading1

Heading1_PgBk

[Thomas_Calvin]

Thanks. True enough that resizing the frames still requires manual oversight of every page when the content changes.

The style option is probably the best, but I'm trying to minimize the number of styles that our team members have to wade through. They are not experienced with strict adherence to styles, so I don't want them to look at this huge list and give up before they start.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

I find that the ol' wooden ruler on the knuckles works wonders for enforcing style use! 😜😜

[Thomas_Calvin]

Or docking pay for every bespoke paragraph!

[Peter Spier]

Keep Options as part of the style are extremely useful in this context.

[Barb Binder]

I'm on Team Keep Options.

You can build most situations into your paragraph styles and avoid manual column/page/frame breaks.

~Barb

~Barb

[Thomas_Calvin]

These are most likely going to be the solution for us. Sometimes we have to track legal approval by page, so we can't have approved & unapproved content mixed by repagination.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Just out of curosity, does legal have to approve each page by signing off each page? If so, do they do it electronically or on an actual printout?

[Thomas_Calvin]

There's a log of changed pages that gets signed off on, with the log and signature appearing on the first page of the chapter. Also, the approval date of each page appears in its footer. We have scans of signatures in the documents right now, but I don't know if that will remain true in the future. The documents are not "secure," in that we can change them at will and are trusted to maintain their integrity.

The whole thing presents some real logistical challenges in terms of creating a continuous text flow but accounting for changes and repagination as time goes on. Historically the solution has been to create A, B, and so forth pages when there's overflow. Obviously that's not great.

Another issue is that we mark (with black vertical bars in the margins) the areas that have changed since the last document release. I'd like to automate the creation of these with scripting; my plan is to do a diff between the old and new version of the document and apply a one-sided border to the changed areas. I suppose I should also generate a report of all pages that are changed.

[Peter Spier]

I think that Keep with next N lines for most, possibly all, paragraphs, along with a Start on next page option for the first paragraph in any section, should take care of most of the problem (but not the black line highlights, and it could cause signatures to move if they are not anchored to the last paragraph).

Adding text to the middle of a topic should just push the next topic to a new page if there is insufficient space, or cause it to move back a page ffor a large deletion, and you would need to check for overset at the end of a story.

[Thomas_Calvin]

Thanks. The signatures only appear on the first page of each chapter, so they don't move.

Because I have continuous flow in the "primary" frame and automatic page-adding on, there should be no overset. That's why it's such a big deal that full book-syncing suffers from a bug that breaks the "primary" flow for no apparent reason sometimes.

[Peter Spier]

Personally, I've never been a fan of primary text frames.

[Thomas_Calvin]

How else do you let document maintainers create a new page and start typing on it, with continuous text flow between pages and auto-addition of pages?

I think the whole "primary" mechanism is dumb; it's absurd that you can't set up any number of text frames on a master page and have them be immediately editable on child pages created from it, but here we are.

[Peter Spier]

I do it the old way, add a page manually, pick up th eoverset text and hold Shift while flowing it on the new page.

As I recall Primary frames only add pages, not subtract when you make cuts, so you have to have some real interaction anyway, and I hear complaints that pages are often added in the wrong location.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

@Peter Spier You can change your preferences to delete empty pages. 

If find that the Primary Frames work well _with the right type of project_. I've used them to produce multiple projects ranging from 500-1000 pages each. 

[rob day]

I think the whole "primary" mechanism is dumb;

To illustrate @Peter Spier ’s suggestion, you can use regular threaded Parent text frames—they don’t have to be Primary. In order to flow text in to the non primary frames on the pages you have to Override the first frame at the starting page:

Threaded non primary text frames on the Parent spread:

Override the Parent frames at the start of the text flow (Command Shift Click)

Paste in text (Smart Reflow is checked in Prefs):

[Peter Spier]

For regular auto-flow you don't even need to override the parent frame. Just hold the shift key and hover the loaded cursor in the parent frame area and all the text you have on the cursor will flow, adding pages as required without smart text reflow.

[Thomas_Calvin]

Thanks. But why is that better than just having a primary flow on the parent page? The requirement to override a non-primary one adds a step that other writers may not be familiar with. When they find that they can't type on a page, they are likely to draw a new text frame and break the whole thing.

[rob day]

I think the whole "primary" mechanism is dumb ... But why is that better than just having a primary flow

Because you are having a hard time with Primary Text Frame usage—it doesn’t sound like your page design is magazine like.

The text will auto flow to the Parent text frame on the next page as you ad overflow text when Smart Text Reflow is on:

Added text flows to the next regular Parent text frame:

[Thomas_Calvin]

I'm not having hard time using them; Adobe's having a hard time not breaking them. The workaround for now is to turn off parent-page syncing.

I can't see creating a document template where people can't simply type on a new page that they add with it. I also don't see why a magazine-like layout would be the appropriate one for primary frames. I think ours is, in fact: Every page's layout is the same; each file is one continuous text flow; we must lose no text; and the whole book must have the same styles. This should be the easiest legitimate publishing anyone could ask for.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

I would add just one additional comment to @rob day 's posts. I think primary text frames are best projects like books and technical manuals.  The magazines I've worked on, they really wouldn't be appropriate since the text jumps around the publication. For magazines, I use the manual approach since it gives me more control over the flow

[Thomas_Calvin]

 I think primary text frames are best projects like books and technical manuals.

I would think the same thing, and that's exactly what I'm doing: technical manuals.

[Peter Spier]

Don't know if that was direct at me or Rob, but my position is that you cannot let untrained people access InDesign files without expecting all kinds of trouble.

[Thomas_Calvin]

you cannot let untrained people access InDesign files without expecting all kinds of trouble.

They're not totally untrained, but I also don't expect them to hunt around for an explanation of why the template they're being asked to switch to and use faithfully doesn't even let them type on a page. It's a needless impediment for everyone.