Long running head placed in short sidebar textbox squishes all text onto one line

in addition to these excellent advices, if you want to have only one master page with variable running header in two or more lines, one another way could be using nested style in your paragraph stile "Title" and and than inserting Special Character "End Nested Style" when you need to have one other line in your running header

Another option is to use a Running Head (Character Style) as the type of variable. Create a Character Style (it doesn't need any formats) and apply it to the first few or most important words in the chapter names. The variable will pick out just those words. Your chapter names will be abbreviated, but if you can live with that, it's a viable solution.

Ah yes. This option is only available if a text is selected that contains a text variable special character.

To convert all instances of your text variables you could delete your custom variable and get the option to convert all instances to text. From my German InDesign where I hit button Delete ( "Löschen" ) and changed the option in the alert window to [x] Text:

But before doing this you should either do a new text variable that is based on the definitions of the one you want to remove or later, after you removed your custom one, load your custom text variable from an earlier version of your document.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

the yellow highlight on the second image is show an issue with your style. as in an override,

can you should us screenshots of how you set up your styles?