How Keep Options Interact
InDesign’s Keep Options are great typographic tools. They can help you prevent widows and orphans in your layouts, by forcing lines of text to stay together. Keep Options can also help articles stay intact by forcing headlines and following text to stick together. On the other hand, Keep Options can also be the source of confusion if you’re working with a document you didn’t create and you don’t know why text is overset or jumping to another frame in a story. So it’s worth knowing how Keep Options interact, and which takes priority when more than one is in use.
See Also: Applying Flexible Paragraph Spacing in InDesign
In the Keep Options dialog box (via Paragraph Style Options, the Control panel menu, or press Command+Option+K/Ctrl+Alt+K), you have four main options: Keep with Previous, Keep with Next, Keep Lines Together, and Start Paragraph.
Keep Lines Together is your widow/orphan control. You can set a paragraph (or even better, a paragraph style) to keep up to 50 lines at the start or end of the paragraph together. So there will be no sad and lonely lines of text at the top or bottom of any page.
When All Lines in Paragraph is selected, an entire paragraph will jump to the next frame in a story, or disappear altogether if any of the paragraph text is overset in a single-frame story.
Note the yellow highlighting in the screenshot above, which indicates a Keep Violation (that all lines in the paragraph aren’t in the frame). You can turn this highlighting on or off in Composition preferences.
But if Keep with Previous is also selected, it will override All Lines in Paragraph, and the text will jump back to stick with the previous paragraph.
Note that Keep with Previous has no effect on widow and orphan prevention. The number of lines you set at Start/End of Paragraph will still be honored.
See Also: My Previous Gem
The Start Paragraph settings at the bottom of the dialog box trump everything else. They’ll move entire paragraphs to the next column, frame, or page. And you can even specify an even or odd page, if you’re creating something like a chapter or section opener where the title should always appear on the same side of a spread. This can be the reason why a text frame suddenly goes overset when you move it from one page to another.
Yes, I absolutely love those keep options. Doing books that can run into hundreds of pages, they save a lot of time. Just keep in mind that they can create layout issues. At times, adding a single short word to a paragraph can trigger a string of keeps that can escalade and add a page to a chapter, creating overflow issues. If you’re starting chapters on right-hand pages, it cann even make a book two-pages longer.
Adobe might want to add a similar option to deal with a single and especially a single short word on the last line of a paragraph. Like widows and orphans, that lone little word tends to look bad. At present, it has to be fixed manually, so I don’t bother. It’d be great is ID handled that.
I’d also love to see Adobe come up with a way to attach a specific master page to a paragraph style. I realize there could be conflicts if two paragraph styles on a page each specify a different master page, but it’d be great for books where the first page of a chapter uses a different master from all the others. At present, that has to be done manually and redone if there are any changes to the pagination.
@inkling:
There are several GREPs that can keep “runts” together. The syntax varies depending who has written the GREP, but the result is generally the same in terms of keeping runt words together. The only drawback is on a large file it can slow a machine down. Try a google search for “InDesign GREP runt”.
Also, there is an add-on from ID-Extras that can attach specific master pages to paragraph styles. Have a look at https://www.id-extras.com/products/mastermatic
In the interests of disclosure, I’m in no way affiliated with id-extras nor was this post a paid post.
Yes Mastermatic is the solution along with Sectionstuff so that footnotes will renumber from the beginning of chapters.
One might also mention that, when breaking footnotes from one page to another, ID ignores keeps settings for the most part.
Text wrap also seems to affect keep options. I’m working on a file where an image with a Jump Object text wrap option chases the text to the following even page although the following odd-numbered page is set in the chased paragraph’s keep options (InDesign CC 2015).
any solution to this? It’s driving me mad!
We always have to work with text in two separate frames (left frame, language A and right frame, language B and both texts have to start on the same height). I abandoned the keep options because both texts often haven’t the same length and I didn’t find a good solution yet. Looking for “runt” with a grep style is a nightmare. Each correction you make CC has to “recalculate” the whole text (it takes sometimes more than 5 mins for 50 pages). Doing it manually is much faster.
I’m fairly experienced with InDesign, but I recently ran into something I’ve never seen before. Working on a new, short manuscript, I have a baseline grid set and all text aligned to the grid. I applied my standard styles: left justify, -5% to +5% justification, keep 2 lines together at the start and end of paragraphs, and a space after of 0.125.
Everything worked as normal until I reached a bullet list. Each item in the list was only 1 line and the paragraph introducing the list was only 2 lines. The list took up about 11 lines at the bottom of a page, spacing should have allowed the entire list to fit on the page. However, the entire list, and the preceding 2 line paragraph were moved to the top of the next page for no apparent reason. I double checked all of my settings and everything appears to be correct. I tried a number of different settings, but nothing fixed the problem. The same issue came up with several other bullet lists in the document. Obviously I have some setting mixed up somewhere, but I’ll be darned if I can figure out what is causing it…
Sounds like it has to be a keep with next/keep with previous issue. If you select each paragraph one at a time and turn off all keep options, you might be able to figure it out. One thing that used to trip me up was when I selected multiple paragraphs and checked the keep options, I failed to notice the empty field for keep with Next Lines (indicating there were conflicting values in the selected paragraphs). It’s subtle but it can be the smoking gun clue.
Mike Rankin, you are my hero right now. Thank you!!
Glad to help, Emily!
I have nothing in the keep box highlighted for any of my paragraph styles (because I turned them all off after having issues). Still, one paragraph style, the one for the body text, is on its own page. Every other style moves onto the next page. I do not know how to resolve this. Please help! Thanks in advance!
Can anyone tell me what “keep with # lines” means? I see every other option explained except for this one, unless I’m not reading properly?