Space After paragraph style not working

[Will Price]

Hello,

Does anybody know why an H1 paragraph style set to span all columns would give different Space After values for all styles underneath? Everything is set to ignore. All separate paragraph styles. No grid set.

I've read the comments from others and followed the advice—still no worky. No idea.

None of the styles has any spacing set to Above. My go-to way to set paragraph spacing no longer works.

Help. It's deeply frustrating.

[Barb Binder]

Setting space between two paragraphs with the same style isn't relevant, because there are different styles in play. 

What is relevant is the leading values of the heads and First Baseline Offset values. 

~Barb

[Will Price]

Hi Barb,

Sorry, I'm still confused. None of those Baseline text frame settings gives me the control I want. It ignores the Space After value. Setting the Leading to auto doesn't seem to affect it. It's all over the place.

How would I make sure I have exact uniform spacing below paragraphs? From a best practice point of view.

I swear my paragraph-style method used to work perfectly previously.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Are you aware of the setting for space below a spanning style? It's set in the Span Columns menu and acts differently/with other spacing settings.

[Will Price]

I wasn't, but I've just checked, and it's set to 0.

Changing the value doesn't appear to affect the spacing here, either.

I am baffled.

I want to control it uniformly from a single paragraph style. That's it.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

You may not be using large enough values. I am pretty sure space below span is what you want here,  but 10mm may be less than the default or other spacing involved. Try a large value to see if it creates the desired effect, then reduce it as needed. 

[Will Price]

Yes, that did something. I removed the Space After from the Indents and Spacing menu and added it to the Span setting. However, it's still uneven. All the para styles below are still at different heights.

This is becoming a nightmare. I might have to resort to manually placed text frames. Totally defeats the point of using paragraph styles.

What have they done to InDesign? It used to be all about setting paragraph-styles.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Looking at that,, I think Barb might be on the right track. There is something pushing those three styles to different levels, and if it's not a frame baseline/first line setting, it's something to do with individual styles grid alignment.

Do any styles use the baseline grid? Does that frame have a custom baseline grid or setting?

[Barb Binder]

Hi @Will Price:

Nothing has changed about this feature in years. Here's a quick example of the two things I mentioned (I'm sure there are others.)

I'm teaching today, but happy to look at your file at a break if you want to send it to me via direct message. Just put it on Dropbox and send me the link.

~Barb

[Will Price]

That would be much appreciated, Barb. I'll send a link.

I want to find a method to control paragraph spacing below uniformly. Hence, any Body/H3/H4 underneath has the exact horizontal alignment, regardless of Leading or Spans, ideally, in one paragraph style.

Best,

Will

[Barb Binder]

Hi Will:

As it turns out, it definitely relates to the leading, but I don't have a good answer for you. I need to throw this back to the other Adobe Community Experts to see if somebody else can zero in on what I'm missing. In my demo below, I went back to the previous version of InDesign to see if this was something new in 2024 that we haven't encountered yet, but the behavior is exactly the same in 2023.

Here's what I'm trying to show: as long as the text is basically the same size, they all line up at the same place. But when we increase the size (and the leading) in the first column, that is throwing off the top alignment. The more leading added to the blurb in column 1, the more it pushes that text down. I also wanted to show that if I remove the Spanned headline, there's no problem at the top of the page—so as you suggested, this is an issue with the span feature.

This seems like the correct way to approach this layout, but it is definitely not working. I am very hopeful that somebody else will look at this and be able to offer further insight. I've used to spanned heads in real life, but never in this combination, so I've definitely not seen this before.

In the meantime, Will, it sounds like you've moved in a different direction which is probably a good idea.

~Barb

[Will Price]

Thanks for taking the time to look into Barb.

My holy grail is single-threaded text boxes with all alignment controlled by styles.  This makes it super easy to update and re-style spacing document-wide. It also guarantees an accurate column layout.

My go-to for years has been to use return spaces (Space After) and soft returns to control the space between blocks of text, leaving the leading to do its thing. I have no idea why it won't work in this instance. No doubt it's something subtle I've missed.

Thanks again,

Will

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Lots of people pick up the technique of spacing with hard and soft returns to break around paragraph spacing, mostly from hacking around in Word. It's a steadfastly deprecated technique — pretty much, using soft returns at all — in pro layout work. As layouts get more complex, such breaks become flow and formatting liabilities. Better to master the proper style-based spacing processes, even if sometimes they go the long way to get to a result.

[Willi Adelberger]

Did you check in your paragraph style the space after and before setting between paragraphs of the same style. If it isset to zero, no space is added.