Indesign Anchored Object Gets Stuck

Question

I have a text frame, which has 3 anchored objects attached to it. In the below image, the second anchored object is selected (the first gray box with the big A on the top left corner), and you can see it's setup there:

My problem is the following: When I expand the text in that anchored object, sometimes it overflows on the second grey box with the A in the left corner, sometimes it pushes the second box down. My intended result would be, to push down the second grey box, depending on the height of the first one, and keeping the distance between the two boxes.

What I also noticed, is, if when the two boxes overlap, if I enter in the Anchored Object Options, and modify the Space Before option by adding 1 to it's value, then removing the 1 afterwards, it fixes my problem, the boxes won't overlap anymore.

Why is it that sometimes InDesign fails to do this calculation at this own, and is there an easier way to force InDesign to recalculate this?

This is how it looks like if I put in a single line break in the given box

This is how it looks like with 3 line breaks in the box

Answer 1

I think you're making a bad implementation of an anchored object. According to the description in your question, the anchored object is a group that contains the capitular letter and a text frame. If the anchored object is a group with several objects when modifying one of them, you will always have to readjust it with the rest of the text.

The anchored object travels with the text containing the anchor as the text reflows.

Making a text frame with flowing text an anchored object inside another text frame goes against the sense of using an anchored object since adding more text within that anchored object will not make the text reflow.

The logical procedure would be:

Create a text paragraph style with:

• Frame shadow
• Left indent
• Right indent
• First line indent

Create the Capitular text frame object and paste it as an anchored object with this options:

• Alignment left
• Space Before 0
• Space After negative

With this you will never have problems with paragraph overlays when adding more text since the only anchored object is a character at the beginning of each paragraph.