Smart Text Reflow

[catherinecforum]

Indesign CC 2018. I've set preferences to Smart Text Reflow/end of story/primary text frames. I've threaded my master page spread text boxes. I've "unlocked" the first page of my document's text box. I've pasted my text. Still no smart text reflow. I restarted Indesign and tried again.

What am I missing?

[Steve Werner · Accepted solution]

I doesn't sound like you made the master page text box a Primary Text Frame. If it were, it would automatically generate a page after the first one.

Here's how they work:

https://indesignsecrets.com/indesign-basics-primary-text-frames.php

I believe that if you uncheck Limit to Primary Text Frames, you can get it to autoflow without Primary Frames, but only after you have created a new frame on a second page, linked to the frame on the first page as described in this article:

https://indesignsecrets.com/make-indesign-add-pages-automatically-as-you-type.php

"You can make Smart Text Reflow work on any text frame by turning off the limitation checkbox in the Preferences dialog box. However, in that case, you still won’t get it on every frame… it will only work for stories that are in frames that are already threaded across two or more pages! In other words, it won’t apply to any frame or story that is only on a single page. "

[Ian Blogs]

It would be better if you placed the text rather than pasting.

[catherinecforum]

Wow, there's always something more to learn! Thank you. Making my master page text boxes "primary" by clicking on the little icon did the trick! Thanks so much.

[~BarbaraT]

I'm having the same problem. Have spent many hours trying to figure out. I'd already found the above (excellent) articles and a video by David, and many other sources in case I was missing something...but it just won't work. Made a test Word file to import and it worked once, but then not with my "real" text file...and then not with the test file. (This after deleting everything, reapplying masters to get back to clean-slate and try again.) This really seemed like a great feature, I somehow never came across before, but I'm perplexed. TIA for any ideas.

[~BarbaraT]

So to update...I just kept trying to import the document and it finally worked, but, not 100%. I adjusted the text box on the master page to an odd size, so it would be easy to see. Once the text imported I reshaped the text box on the master page and it worked on the right-hand page, but inconsistently on the left. Weird.