InDesign

TOPIC APPEARS IN:

Control paragraph breaks using Keep Options

You can specify how many lines of the following paragraph remain with the current paragraph as it moves between frames—a convenient way to ensure that headings don’t become isolated from the body text they introduce. InDesign can highlight the paragraphs that sometimes break in violation of your settings.

You may not want to use Keep Options if your document does not require your columns to share the same last baseline.

To highlight paragraphs that violate Keep Options, choose Edit > Preferences > Composition (Windows) or InDesign > Preferences > Composition (Mac OS), select Keep Violations, and click OK.
  1. Select the paragraph or paragraphs you want to affect.
  2. Choose Keep Options in the Paragraph panel menu or Control panel menu. (You can also change keep options when creating or editing a paragraph style.)
  3. Select any of these options and then click OK:

    • For Keep With Next _ Lines, specify the number of lines (up to five) of the subsequent paragraph that the last line of the current paragraph stays with. This option is especially useful for making sure that a heading stays with the next few lines of the paragraph that follows it.

    • Select the Keep Lines Together option and select All Lines In Paragraph to prevent the paragraph from breaking.

    • Select the Keep Lines Together option, select At Start/End of Paragraph, and specify the number of lines that must appear at the beginning or ending of the paragraph to prevent orphans and widows.

    • For Start Paragraph, choose an option to force InDesign to push the paragraph to the next column, frame, or page. If Anywhere is selected, the start position is determined by the Keep Line Settings option. For other options, they will be forced to start from these positions.

When you create paragraph styles for headings, use the Keep Options panel to make sure that your headings remain with the paragraph that follows them.