The Curious Case of Occasional Overset

Mike Rankin

18

Here’s a fun one for you troubleshooters and sleuths out there. See if you can guess why a library item consisting of a simple text frame would become overset in some locations and not in others.

Here are your clues:

If you use the Place Item command from the library, things are fine. You never get overset. If you drag the item out and drop it on the page, the text sometimes oversets. But not always.

You might be thinking right off the bat that it’s the Text Wrap setting of some other page object that’s to blame. Not so. You can take everything else off the spread and still see the problem.

When you copy and paste the item on to another spread or into another document, the text sometimes oversets. In fact, you get different results depending on your zoom level before pasting.

But again, it always works fine when you choose Place Item from the library menu. The text formatting is consistent. So are the Text Frame Options. Identical items are sitting by themselves on the same page of the same document and yielding different results.

The only thing that is different is the X/Y coordinates. There’s a clue.

Here’s another one: If you move the text frame completely onto the pasteboard, the overset disappears. But if any part of the text frame touches the spread, the overset sometimes comes back.

Here’s your final clue, a screen shot of the Control panel in Paragraph mode with the text frame selected (click the image for a larger view).

Got your answer? OK, scroll down?

Scroll down more.

A little more. I know some of you have enormous monitors.

The answer is that one of the paragraphs in the frame was set to Align to Grid.

This forces the text up or down, regardless of the Vertical Justification and First Baseline settings in the Text Frame Options.

Now, let’s work our way backward through the clues to unravel the mystery.

The screenshot of the Control panel shows that there are mixed settings for Align to Grid when the frame is selected.

The pasteboard screenshot shows the text is sitting higher in the frame than it should be.

Also, the baseline grid does not extend to the pasteboard. That’s why the frame doesn’t overset when it’s entirely off the page. There’s no grid to align to out there.

Results vary with copy and paste (and different magnifications) because the Paste command puts the frame in the center of the current view.

And finally (or firstly), dragging the frame out of the library produces mixed results, depending on where you dropped the frame in relation to the baseline grid. But using the library’s Place Item command puts the frame at its original X/Y coordinates, where it was OK when it was first created.

I came across an example of this problem last week where there was only one line of text snugly fit into a frame, and set to Align to Grid. So it was all or nothing. Either it looked right, or was totally overset.

The tricky thing about that case was, the style in the library item didn’t even use Align to Grid, but it was based on another style that did.

But now I’m getting ahead of myself.