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dancingjewel
Known Participant
February 12, 2022
Question

Trouble with "mystery" page breaks in InDesign Redux

  • February 12, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 1021 views

So, I have the same problem as a January 6, 2020 poster, "Trouble with "mystery" page breaks in InDesign," which was solved by Randy Hagan. I place a Word document into an InDesign Document, and every <cr> becomes a page break. Well, it certainly seems that his answer about going to Paragraph Styles and Keep Options and Start Paragraph Anywhere worked. At least it did two days ago when I tested it.

 

I am now working on the actual files, and the same behavior happened. I went into the Keep Options submenu and made the changes. But this time, it fixed only one <cr>, all the rest stayed as Start Paragraph on the next page. When I tested this, I KNOW that one or two fixes repaired the whole document because it seemed like magic after spending 30 minutes on chat with an Adobe Product Specialist who just kept repeating, "Word and InDesign are two different programs." 

 

This is a 450 pp document, and I will NOT do this same procedure 2-3,000 times to fix it. I must be missing something. I have reread the post; I have tried every possible combination I can think of (including selecting all and then trying it, but it won't let me change the start position for all the paragraphs).

 

Please tell me there is a way to fix the whole document with one to two Keep Options fixes.

 

Thanks.

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2 replies

James Gifford—NitroPress
James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
February 13, 2022

Not quite the same thing, but Word often puts bizarre crypto-codes in content that has either been edited many times or perhaps edited by varying generations of the program. I recently worked with a massive Word file that had literally thousands of very strange tracking formats—a word would be squished into a blur. Search and replace with wildcards was (as so often) the answer... but compounding the problem was that there were... 20? 30? different codes, and a search was needed for each. I simply found the next one and did a find/change with those parameters, and it would fix some percentage of the flaws.

 

All of which is why I suggest to authors and contributors and anyone having trouble... clean up the Word file before importing it. Word has better search/replace for its own codes and formats and while the job can be tedious no matter how approached, bringing it into ID without any such flaws will speed most jobs along.

 

Saving the Word file to RTF and reopening can also do a lot of cleanup on a buggy Word file and eliminate downstream problems for ID.

 

But skillful use of search/replace (okay, find/change) is a powerful tool for these kinds of glitches.

 

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dancingjewelAuthor
Known Participant
February 13, 2022

That's interesting, NP, but would you mind listing these tracking codes? In all honesty, I avoid Word like the plague. My preference is LaTeX for anything where I care about the format. Sure, sometimes it can be tricky, but rarely is there a time when I can't make the final product look exactly like I want. Otherwise, I use Pages. It isn't perfect, but it usually doesn't get in my way. Then I export to Word, which generally produces either correct or very close output, without all the bizarre stuff that Word tends to add.

 

But sometimes, I have to work with Word, and knowing what I should be looking for when looking for these tracking formats you discuss would be very helpful.

James Gifford—NitroPress
James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
February 13, 2022

Please don't go to any trouble; I was primarily curious.

 

As for LaTeX, you can use it for many things once you know it. I haven't written any fiction, but I have worked on all sorts of other materials using LaTeX and found it so flexible and easy to use. Most importantly, I call it What You Get Is What You Want, or WYGIWYW! But, it has a tremendously steep learning curve and is very rare in the US outside of academia. So your point is quite valid.

 


Every craftsman has hir own tools. I don't argue such points unless someone is really using a screwdriver as a hammer. 🙂 And I often use ID (and used to use FrameMaker) for things like correspondence, so...

 

I was trying to remember exactly how I fixed the problem I described, which drove me crazy because even direct attempts to apply a "clean" format or remove a defined one failed. I finally created a character style called TIPMO (This Is P* Me Off). I selected each instance of hyper-squished text and updated the style, then used Find/Change to find each instance and change the style to None. For some reason, that worked, but as I said, there were 20-30 iterations of the broken style, caused by an ms that had been worked on for years and years.

 

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Community Expert
Eugene TysonCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 12, 2022

If you can supply the file I can fix it for you. Not a problem.

 

One thing you could try is

Edit>Find/Change

Select the GREP tab

Insert a full stop like this .

 

Only that . in the find field

 

In the Change to Field

$0

 

And in the Change Format click the blank area

Find the keep options setting

 

You should look something like this

make sure the search; is for Document

 

 

But if you're issues - supply the file and I can take a look at it.

 

 

 

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dancingjewelAuthor
Known Participant
February 12, 2022

I can try that also, thanks.

 

But I might have also found another fix. I kept playing around with it and tried changing things. I changed (approximately) the "Paragraph format look ahead" to "sentence format" (same Paragraph style pop out menu) and then did the Keep Options fix. I think that worked, but it was late, and I don't know if the resulting file was messed up for some reason. But I think it looked good.

 

thanks again.

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