YouTube Video — Transcript

Learn how to control paragraph breaks across columns and pages in Adobe InDesign using Keep Options for clean, professional text flow.

Key Takeaways

Use Keep Options in paragraph styles to control paragraph breaks across columns and pages.
Redefine paragraph styles after applying local Keep Options to avoid style overrides and maintain consistency.
Keep With Next and Keep With Previous settings help keep related paragraphs together for better reading flow.
Allow flexibility in longer paragraphs by adjusting Keep Lines Together settings to prevent excessive page count.
Keyboard shortcuts (e.g., Command-9) speed up access to Keep Options, improving workflow efficiency.

Summary

Michael Murphy demonstrates how to fix awkward paragraph breaks in multi-column InDesign layouts using paragraph-level Keep Options.
He explains how to select all text and apply Keep Lines Together to prevent unwanted breaks within paragraphs.
The video covers redefining paragraph styles to incorporate Keep Options and remove style overrides for consistency.
Michael adjusts Keep With Next and Keep With Previous settings to keep related paragraphs together, improving readability.
He shows how to allow flexible breaks in longer paragraphs by changing Keep Lines Together from 'All Lines' to 'At Start/End'.
The tutorial includes tips on keyboard shortcuts for accessing Keep Options quickly.
Michael addresses challenges like text overflow and page count constraints, offering solutions to maintain layout integrity.
He creates a new paragraph style for special cases where text needs to be pushed to the next column.
The video emphasizes the efficiency of using paragraph styles with Keep Options to save time and manual formatting effort.
Finally, Michael previews future topics and encourages designers to leverage these features for professional typography.

Chapters

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

If your text formatting looks perfect, but your paragraphs break in the worst possible places, this video will show you how to automatically flow or break paragraphs across columns and pages exactly the way you want, with no manual line breaks and no resizing text frames.

Speaker A

Let's take a look. Hello again everyone. Welcome back. I'm Michael Murphy, and this is The InDesigner, the channel that provides information, instruction, and insight for designers using and learning Adobe InDesign.

Speaker A

In this document, I have ten pages of course listings from an academic catalog. In my last video, I used the Next Style feature to format these 400-plus paragraphs in about two seconds with only three clicks.

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If you haven't seen that video yet, there's a link to it in the description.

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Now that everything's formatted, I'm looking at how the text flows through the columns and across pages, and there are some problems.

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The first example of the problem is at the bottom of the first column. I have the course title and the credits and hours information, but only the first line of the course description appears in this column before it breaks and flows to the next column.

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That just looks awkward. It's even worse at the bottom of the second column. Only the Course Title and Credits and Hours paragraphs are here.

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The description is completely detached from those at the top of the next column. I don't like this aesthetically, and I think it's a bad reading experience.

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So I'd like to fix this by controlling where paragraphs break and are allowed to flow across columns, frames, and pages.

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To do that, I'll take advantage of a paragraph-level feature called Keep Options. I'll start this in a sledgehammer kind of way, very broadly across the whole document.

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I'll hit Command-A to select all the text, and from Window > Type and Tables > Paragraph, I can access the Keep Options dialog.

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We'll get to all of these settings over the course of this video. But for now, I'll click Keep Lines Together.

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And you can already see that there was a shift in the flow of text on the page.

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I'll choose All Lines in Paragraph and click OK. I'll close this Paragraph panel, too.

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I've added rules about whether or not paragraphs can break, but I haven't really solved the problem. At the bottom of the first column, I now just have the course title and the credits and hours.

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The entire description paragraph has jumped up to the top of the next column because it's set to keep all lines in the paragraph together.

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It's even worse at the bottom of the second column, where the course title is just orphaned.

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Credits and hours, the description, and the requirements all appear at the top of the next column.

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Since I made this as a local change outside of the paragraph style settings, I've also created a problem for myself in terms of style overrides.

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My cursor is in this description, and you can see in the Paragraph Styles panel that there's a plus sign indicating an override.

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When I hover over it, it shows me that the override is keep all lines in paragraph together, which I just applied.

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Style overrides lead to inconsistency, so what I'll do is come up to the Paragraph Styles panel menu and choose Redefine Style, which incorporates whatever overrides I've made into the style definition.

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And now the plus symbol is gone. There's no more override here, but there is for all the other paragraphs.

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If I put my cursor in the Course Title, it has the same override, so I'll right-click and choose Redefine Style.

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For Credits and Hours, I'll use the keyboard shortcut Shift Command Option R to redefine that style, and its plus sign goes away.

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Then I'll do the same for requirements: get my cursor in the text, hit Shift Command Option R to redefine the style, and now all of the overrides are gone.

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But that hasn't fixed the problem of how things are breaking at the bottom of these columns throughout my document.

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We're just looking at page one, but I've got ten pages here, and there are bad breaks happening at the bottoms of columns everywhere.

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And I've created another problem to fix, because the Keep Options have pushed the text into an 11th page, and I may or may not have that available to me.

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I may be constrained to ten pages. So let's see how we can get this exactly the way we want.

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I'll go back to page one, select this course title, come up to Course Title in the Paragraph Styles panel, choose Edit Course Title, go to Keep Options, and here's that Keep Lines Together: All Lines in Paragraph setting that I baked into the paragraph styles when I redefined them.

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I'm going to tweak some of these other settings to make sure that all these paragraphs behave and break the way I want them to.

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For this Course Title, I'll change Keep With Next 0 Lines to Keep With Next 1 Line.

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That means that the Course Title cannot be separated from Credits and Hours. They will never break across a column or a page.

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Other than that, Keep Lines Together: All Lines in Paragraph is appropriate here, so I'll go ahead and click OK.

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Next, I'll edit the Credits and Hours style, and I'll jump to the Keep Options by hitting Command-9.

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So… fun fact: The first ten items in this left-hand list of options are accessible by hitting Command and a number key.

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So Command-1 is General, Command-0 is Hyphenation. Then there's Command-2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8… and Command-9 is Keep Options.

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After hyphenation, you're on your own. There's no keyboard shortcut for anything beyond that in the dialog box.

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I'm a big fan of keyboard shortcuts, so I just wanted to share that tip with you.

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So we're in the Keep Options for Credits and Hours, and here again, I want to make sure that Credits and Hours can't be separated from the start of the description.

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So I'll choose Keep With Next 1 Line, and you're already seeing the effect of that on the document.

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To adhere to the rule I just added, it had to keep those paragraphs together.

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So I'll just click OK to save those settings. I'll skip the Description for now and jump ahead to the Requirements style.

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Edit that and jump to Keep Options using the Command-9 keyboard shortcut. For this paragraph style, I'll check Keep With Previous, which is effectively going to glue the Requirements paragraph to the last line of the Description paragraph.

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You may have just noticed that listing at the bottom of the middle column had to jump to the next column in order for the description and the requirements to all fit together.

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I'll just click OK, and now, as I look through this document, there are no course listings that are separated in any way.

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Everything breaks cleanly across a column or a page. However, I still have 11 pages in here, and like I said, if I'm restricted to ten pages, I'll have to make this fit somehow.

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So I have to add some flexibility into the very strict Keep Options that I've set here.

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I'll jump back to page one, select this Description paragraph, right-click on Description, choose Edit Description, and jump to the Keep Options.

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In my first step, I set this paragraph and all the others to keep all lines in the paragraph together, and that works fine for the other three paragraphs.

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They're all very short, many of them a single line, but the description is a lot longer, and I can allow it to break according to rules I choose by changing this from All Lines in Paragraph to At Start/End of Paragraph.

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They're both set at two lines by default, which means at least the first two lines of the Description paragraph have to fit at the bottom of one column before the paragraph can split and jump to the start of the next column.

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And there have to be at least two more lines of the description after the paragraph has flowed into the next column, or it won't be allowed to break.

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With these settings, a three-line paragraph would never break because there would never be enough lines on either side of that break.

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I can change these values to whatever I want, but I'm good with this, so I'll click OK.

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And now, any description that breaks has at least two lines at the bottom.

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And that applies across the entire document. I still have gaps at the bottom of some columns, but a little whitespace never hurt anybody.

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More importantly, though, I've solved my 11th page problem. There are now only ten pages in this document because breaking those longer descriptions across columns and pages tightened up the entire flow of the text.

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Now there may be instances where I want or need to push text into the next column or onto the next page.

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For example, on the second spread, there's an awkward break in this listing where the description paragraph breaks according to the rules I set, but because it's actually across a page and there's this longer Requirements paragraph that runs two lines, it feels awkward and unbalanced.

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I'd like to force this into the next column, but not in a manual way.

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I'll select this Course Title, hit Command-Option-K for Keep Options, and change the Start Paragraph setting from Anywhere to In Next Column, which pushes that course title to the next column.

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Because I made that change, I've introduced another style override… and I'm not a fan of overrides.

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Plus, I might need to do this same kind of “push” in other places in the document where I feel like it would benefit the layout.

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So I'll create a New Paragraph Style for this and name it Course Title (Pushed).

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Apply Style to Selection is checked, o once I click OK this paragraph will automatically have this new style applied to it.

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Because I chose New Paragraph Style while I had text selected that uses the Course Title style, this new style is automatically based on that Course Title style, which creates a parent child relationship between both.

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That gives me additional flexibility, as you'll see in a moment. I'll click OK, and the Course Title (Pushed) Paragraph Style has been applied.

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I'm going to deviate momentarily from the Keep Options topic to quickly show you the benefit of having one style based on another style.

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If I edit the original Course Title style -- let's say I change the character color to red -- All the course titles are changed, including this one up at the top that uses the new Course Title (Pushed) Paragraph Style.

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Why did that change too? Because Course Title (Pushed) is identical in every way but one to Course Title.

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That one change is the Start Paragraph in Next Column setting. So, other than that, any attributes I change in the original Course Title style that aren't explicitly different in the Course Title (Pushed) style will just be passed down.

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This lets me continue to make document-wide changes by modifying only the one Course Title style.

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I'll undo that because I don't want my text in red. I just wanted you to see how that inheritance works.

Speaker A

Okay, back to the Keep Options. I can apply this new style with its unique Keep Options as I see fit for any other Course Title I want to push to another column, whenever it's needed.

Speaker A

For example, I'll select this one and change it to Course Title (Pushed). And there you go.

Speaker A

So in addition to defining how the text in your paragraph looks, paragraph styles can define how those paragraphs break and flow throughout your document, so you don't have to waste time putting in manual line breaks, or dragging text columns up and down to force text where you needed to go.

Speaker A

It just does it because it's told to by the paragraph style. One last thing I want to show is how this Start Paragraph setting in the Keep Options really shines in the context of a longer document, like a book.

Speaker A

So for that, I'll open another file. This file is the book interior for a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, and it has a title page and a two-page Table of Contents that InDesign automatically generated.

Speaker A

That'll probably be the topic of a future video. On page five, I have the preface, then an introduction that starts on page seven, a section title on page 13, and the first chapter starting on page 15.

Speaker A

I'll put my cursor in the text and hit Command-A to Select All. Then hit the down arrow key, which puts me at the end of the book on page 314.

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I'll Select All again, hit the up arrow key, and I'm back to the preface on page five.

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Everything from the preface through the conclusion of the book is one single story, as InDesign calls it, flowed through hundreds of different text frames.

Speaker A

But how does that explain what's going on here with this section title? Or here… where one chapter ends and another chapter begins?Or here… where a chapter ends on a right hand page, then skips a page to start the next chapter on the next right-hand page?

Speaker A

This is a continuous flow of text. So what sorcery is this? How did I make this happen?

Speaker A

The exact same way I did with those pushed course titles. I'll select this Chapter Number which uses the Chapter Number Paragraph Style, right-click that, choose edit Chapter Number, go to Keep Options and Start Paragraph is set to On Next Odd Page, which is generally what you'll want

Speaker A

in a book, where chapters tend to start on a right-hand page. So, wherever text that's formatted with this Chapter Number paragraph style appears, it will be forced to jump into the next odd-numbered page, which is why this starts here… instead of here.

Speaker A

Keep Options can really help you control where text falls in something long like a book, and that's especially important as you start making changes to the book's formatting in the design process.

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Some chapters might run longer or shorter than your original rough layout, which will change where chapters start or end.

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If you're doing this manually, you're adding a lot of extra work for yourself. Instead, let the paragraph style do it for you with Keep Options.

Speaker A

So let's recap. In this video, we've seen that you can control how your text breaks across columns or pages using Keep Options..

Speaker A

That you can be super strict with it so that nothing's allowed to break or, for certain paragraphs that are longer, allow flexibility in the required number of lines in a paragraph before it's allowed to break or after it breaks.

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We looked at how the Start Paragraph setting dictates if something can just start right after the preceding paragraph, or if it gets pushed to the next column, frame or page.

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We used Redefine Style to incorporate changes into an existing paragraph style. We learned how styles based on other styles continue to inherit attributes from the original style, and we saw how to use Command-0 through Command- 9 to quickly navigate within the Paragraph Styles dialog box.

Speaker A

Keep Options in a paragraph style can save you hours of manual formatting or reflowing text to get column and page breaks exactly where you want them.

Speaker A

If you want to try this for yourself. You can download the before and after versions of this InDesign file from the link in the description below.

Speaker A

That's it for this one. Thank you so much for watching. If this is the kind of InDesign content you want to see, please help me get this channel off the ground by subscribing.

Speaker A

Hit the like button if you found this helpful and hit the notification bell to be notified.

Speaker A

Anytime I upload new content, which I'll be doing very soon. If you have questions or comments, I would love to hear from you, so please reach out in the comments below.

Speaker A

For the designer, this is Michael Murphy. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

Topics:Adobe InDesignparagraph breaksKeep Optionstext flowcolumn breakspage breaksparagraph stylestypographylayout designInDesign tutorial

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the purpose of Keep Options in Adobe InDesign?

Keep Options allow you to control how paragraphs break across columns, frames, and pages, ensuring related text stays together and improving readability.

How can I avoid style overrides when applying Keep Options?

After applying Keep Options locally, you should redefine the paragraph style to incorporate the changes, which removes the override indicators and maintains style consistency.

Can Keep Options help reduce manual text frame resizing?

Yes, by properly setting Keep Options in paragraph styles, you can automate paragraph breaks and flow, eliminating the need for manual line breaks or resizing text frames.

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