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Martha945

: InDesign: Keep paragraph (with forced line break) together across pages I'm using a forced line break (a.k.a. soft return) in my chapter titles. I'm grabbing those paragraph styles to generate

@Martha945

Posted in: #AdobeIndesign #ParagraphStyles

I'm using a forced line break (a.k.a. soft return) in my chapter titles. I'm grabbing those paragraph styles to generate a table of contents. But now the text for those chapter titles can get broken up in my table of contents at the end of a page, as shown:



How can I prevent this behavior? My workaround is to add a page break in front of the Chapter 14 line so that it begins on the following page. But I'd rather modify the paragraph style that I'm using in my TOC so that I don't have to go through and manually add page breaks every time I update the TOC.

I tried setting the Keep options for that paragraph style, but it had no effect.

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@Holmes874

Luke’s answer is correct that the Keep Options are the place to look. In addition to what Luke says about setting the Keep Lines Together option for the paragraph you’re having trouble with, however, there is another side to it: the Keep with Previous and Keep with Next options found right above it.

If you tick the Keep with Previous option, InDesign will avoid column/frame breaks between this paragraph and the one before it.

Similarly, if you set the Keep with Next option to any number higher than zero, InDesign will avoid column/frame break between this paragraph and the following X lines (where X = the number you specify in the field).

A problem can then arise if you have several paragraphs of text, enough to fill more than an entire column/frame/page, and all of them have the Keep with Previous and/or Keep with Next options set as well as having the Keep Lines Together option set to All Lines in Paragraph.

If this happens, you will—quite logically—end up with a text container, an amount of text that won’t fit into the container—and an InDesign which is told that it’s not allowed to add a break to the next container anywhere at all in the text.

So what is InDesign to do? Well, there are two options, and I think both have actually been chosen at different points in the history of InDesign:


Ignore the user’s settings, since the user is clearly wrong here, and just break the text where the container ends
Honour the user’s settings and suffer the consequence that the text won’t fit in the container—in other words, throw up your hands, throw an error, and make all the text overset with an empty container

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@Margaret771

Which of the "Keep Options" did you use? It seems to me that it should work if you used the keep all lines in the paragraph option in your TOC style definition.



I apologize if you have already tried this and it didn't work. I wanted to post this as a comment/question, but then decided it would benefit from a picture, so I am posting it as an answer.

A good article that talks about how the different "Keep" options interact with each other (you might find it useful) is this article at InDesign Secrets.

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@Hamaas979

Keep Options is the right direction here. If your style is not being overridden by direct changes, or other styles, then the options here should have it covered.
Keeping all lines of the paragraph seems the right option for your purpose.

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