Text boxes shrinking

[HannahMcAbbott]

I'm working on a 900+ page book and text frames for captions repeatedly shrink to a single line, despite being set up correctly and then set up yet again correctly. How to stop this? I have very slow internet, and it's a huge file, but I can't think of why this should happen.

[Michael Bullo]

It's possible to have a text box automatically resize in different ways to hug the text within it. With a text box selected, right mouse click on it, choose Text Frame Options and then the Auto-Size section.

The following video might help...

Auto Resize (Fit) Text Box to Text in InDesign
https://youtu.be/W0ub8hFP3lc

[HannahMcAbbott]

No, the text box reduces to a single line irrespective of how many lines are in the text. This means that all following lines of text have effectively disappeared. On a 900+ page book that takes a lot of time to fix, and there's no guarantee it will stay fixed. So frustrating.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

This is not normal/desired behavior. When do the caption boxes shrink — on editing, or on re-opening the document?

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[HannahMcAbbott]

I've attached a screen shot so you can see what's happening.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Right, but when is this happening? Does it not let you have more than one line? Does it collapse to one line when you move elsewhere to edit? Or is this happening when you close and reopen the document?

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[HannahMcAbbott]

It seems to only happen when the document is reopened.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Something that occurred to me last night was that there may be an Object Style applied to these text boxes that is applying/forcing unwanted behavior.

Click on any one of the problem caption boxes and see if an Object Style is in play.

If one is, optimize one caption box and use it to update the style. And, if you aren't using an object style for these, I'd suggest creating one and applying it to all of them... that should be the last time you have to go through the book and manually touch each one. You can adjust the characteristics for all of them from that style.

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[HannahMcAbbott]

Thanks for that suggestion. There is no Object Style for any of the text boxes, so that's not causing the problem, but perhaps it will help fix it.

[Willi Adelberger]

There is always an object style attached, if not you create a correct object style, InDesign will use th (wrong) built-in default object style with your manually done changes. Therefore it is. highly recommended to create and use properly styles.

This is also valid for paragraph styles.

[Laubender]

Hi @HannahMcAbbott ,

could you share a sample caption text frame with us?

Just a one page document that includes the caption text frame.

Possible issues:

Another frame has text wrap applied to and does not allow the frame to show text other than that one line.

Something inside the text of the caption enforces a permanent text overset.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( Adobe Community Expert )

[HannahMcAbbott]

The problem recurs without reopening the file, as I've just discovered, having fixed all the text boxes. When I tried to export it I got an error message with overset text on 11 pages, all captions, and all of which I'd already fixed. I'll attach a screen shot of the last caption I fixed. Not all of them do this, and there is nothing in the text box to explain it. There's also nothing nearby and no text wrap applied as far as I can tell. I'm editing this file, so I don't have the fonts on my computer, but I hope the sample is still useful.

[Willi Adelberger]

Your example show many wrong and useless set ups in your document. I don't know if this is causing the problem, but correct work would hep to create clean files.

1. One screen shoot shows empty frames with an X in uit. Why? Dekete all those useless frames. Use text warp as part of the object style of the image.
2. All text has manual overrides. Avoid overrides, work with correct paragraph styles.
3. Many Word importet styles are in the document. Delete them and use the correct style.
4. Only basic text frames are used. Create correct object styles.
5. Your Layer Panels show levels of the text. That indicates that you put Headlines in different layers than the text. This is wrong as headlines have to be part of the text thread. Otherwise you will get problems with automatic tocs and even with normal text flows.
6. Your swatch panel is filled up with imported Word RGB Color swatches. Clean it up, otherwise it will be a trapp to use wrong colors.
7. You use fake small caps, try to find a correct font.

[HannahMcAbbott]

Thanks for the tutorial, Willi. I'll pass all that on to the designer. You have the set-up from my InDesign, not his (swatches, etc.), so it may be double irrelevant advice. I don't see how any of what you list could be affecting the text boxes and making them shrink. I have one problem, and nobody has been able to provide an explanation so far.

[HannahMcAbbott]

*doubly

[Laubender]

Hi @HannahMcAbbott ,

opened your sample InDesign document with my German InDesign 2022 version 17.4.

Have no issues with a shrinking text frame and overset text.

The height of the text frame stays as it is when I remove text from the caption.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

[HannahMcAbbott]

Thanks Uwe. Not all the text boxes shrink, so I'm not surprised you weren't able to duplicate the problem. But thanks for trying.