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I am laying out my grandpa's life story in InDesign. The left page of a spread will have a scanned image of his hand-written story while the right page will have the typed version.

Because I would like the typed copy to match the hand-written copy on each spread, there will be a frame break and a link to the next spread's text box.

I have a "First Line Left Indent" of 0.5 in on the "[Basic Paragraph]" paragraph style. However, after a mid-sentence frame break, an indent will occur at the top of the next page.

While this is expected behavior, since it is not necessarily the start of a new paragraph in his handwriting, is there a way to "automatically" get rid of the left indent that occurs after each mid-sentence frame break?

enter image description here

I've seen some post/articles about the grep styles, but as I understand it, these are character styles you can apply to matches within the paragraph style. Since indentation is defined at the paragraph style level, I'm not seeing how this could help.

I could create a second "No Indent" paragraph style and manually apply it as needed, but doing this for all 140 pages could mean a lot of rework if the layout needs to change down the road.

Coming from a programming background I'm thinking these would be the "rules":

 if (there is a frame break that occurs in the middle of a sentence) {
   do not indent the next paragraph
 } else {
   indent the next paragraph as normal
 }

Is it possible to setup something like this in InDesign?

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  • The indent should only occur if there's a hard line feed there. Remove the line feed.. .or use a soft-line feed (shift+return).
    – Scott
    Sep 7, 2015 at 22:29
  • @Scott Thanks for taking a look. I haven't been using return. I placed my cursor where the break needed to occur and then used Type > Insert Break Character > Frame Break. Is there a way to do this without the frame break then?
    – robertwbradford
    Sep 7, 2015 at 22:34
  • 1
    The frame break is a hard line feed + frame jump. If you don't want the indent you have to either A) create a paragraph style without it or B) adjust text frames to fit the text you want rather than jump frames.
    – Scott
    Sep 7, 2015 at 22:41
  • That's what I was afraid of :) For now I'll just do the second paragraph style and apply it manually as needed. Thanks.
    – robertwbradford
    Sep 7, 2015 at 22:43
  • I don't get why you (think to) need to insert a manual page break. InDesign is perfectly able to wrap paragraphs to next pages by itself. If you did so because "there is an image in the text" (apparently), then look into text wrap.
    – Jongware
    Sep 8, 2015 at 6:37

1 Answer 1

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As has been stated in the comments, the new line is indented because you have set up your paragraphs to be indented at the start. If you don't want to use paragraph styles to create paragraphs without the indentation, and set these paragraphs in that style, then your best option is to use a break that isn't recognized by InDesign as starting a new paragraph.

What I would do is to use a line break (Shift+Enter for Windows), and then roll your text frame up so that the next line is pushed to the next text frame.

I can't get a screenshot that shows this, but select your text frame with the Selection tool (the black arrow), and then move your cursor over the square that is showing at the bottom center of the text frame. enter image description here The selection tool will change into a double pointed arrow pointing up and down. Click and drag on that box until the bottom of the text frame is cutting the text on the second line in half horizontally.

This shortens the text frame so that it is only tall enough to hold the text above your second line, and the second line will automatically flow into the next linked text box. When I was first learning Pagemaker (back in the day), it was suggested that I think of the text box as being a roller shade that has been pulled down to cover the entire height of a window. When you select and drag upward on that bottom square, imagine that you are rolling up the shade until you can only see the text that you want to keep in that particular text frame. The rest of the text will automatically be pushed into the next text frame. enter image description here

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