: Can new-chapter page break be omitted? How do you start new chapters on the same page? I'm using the latest InDesign. EDIT: I'm making a book, with about a hundred short chapters, sometimes

@Margaret771

Based on your edit, the answer is yes, it is possible to start a new chapter in a book without having a page break before it.

InDesign does have an actual chapter feature, but that is directly related to individual documents in an InDesign Book (a special type of InDesign file that contains references to a list of individual InDesign documents that each represent a chapter to appear in the final work). Using the Book feature, it is not possible to start a new document/chapter on the same page as the previous one ends.

You can make books without using Books, however (note capitalisation). A single InDesign document can easily—and frequently does—represent an entire book. All the chapters in the book are then simply strings of text within that document, and what separates them—visually, the chapter title—is merely a particular paragraph style. Whether or not this paragraph style is set up to always begin on a new page (or, as is often the case in books with longer chapters, on the next right-side page) is up to you: you define the style, after all, so you can decide whether to set it up like this or not.

If you don’t set up your chapter title paragraph style to force a page break before it, it will simply appear at the place in the text flow where it is structurally: right after the end of the body text of the previous chapter.

If you plan on using the Sections and Numbering features, however, you should be aware that all options there are applied to an entire page, so if you have two half-page chapters on the same page, you’ll have to choose which one should be used as far as Sections and Numbering is concerned. But that’s a practical caveat you’d have had to worry about anyway: if you have running headers along the top of each page, for instance, you would in any case have to decide which of the two half-page chapters that both appear on page 48 would give their title to the running header, whether InDesign’s Section features forced you to or not.

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