Text Flow Seems Super Buggy

[J. L. Clodfelter]

Hey there! 

I'm working on my wife's first book and I imported all of the text from a word document into text frames using text flow. But just as I've seen others on these forums having similar problems, the text does really weird thing like leaving large gaps and messing up the entire rest of the document if you try to adjust anything with the Flow Options. I have tried so many different options and methods and nothing seems to work. Is text flow just completely broken or am I missing something? Videos attached. 

[MikeTO]

Hi @J. L. Clodfelter and welcome to the forums. Change Keep with Next # Lines from 7 (first recording) and 5 (second recording) to 0. Combined with the other Flow Options, that's a recipe for big gaps in text.

[J. L. Clodfelter]

2 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

Hi @J. L. Clodfelter and welcome to the forums. Change Keep with Next # Lines from 7 (first recording) and 5 (second recording) to 0. Combined with the other Flow Options, that's a recipe for big gaps in text.

Thanks for the quick reply! I actually did already try this. If you'll notice in the first video, I set it to 0 and messed with several different settings. Nothing seems to work naturally. There's always some really buggy section.

[MikeTO]

I would start by deleting all the blank paragraphs. The Flow Options aren't designed to work with blank paragraphs, it's better to use Space Before or Space After if extra space is required. If you're trying to force a paragraph to the start of the next frame, replace the paragraph break with a column, frame, or page break. (Note that in Publisher you should replace a paragraph break with another type of break and not put the column, frame, or page break on its own in a blank paragraph.)

Also never turn on Keep With Previous Paragraph for all paragraphs as you showed in that first recording - you're directing Publisher to keep every paragraph with the paragraph before it which is impossible.

Flow Options need to be used sparingly. I recommend trying this:

• Body paragraphs: select Prevent Orphaned First Lines and Prevent Widowed Last Lines. Set Keep with Next to 0.
• Headings: Set Keep with Next to 2 and leave everything else off.

[J. L. Clodfelter]

Man, that was super helpful information. Thank you so much. I actually think I got something to work. This was stressing me out so much yesterday. You're a blessing. Thank you, sir!

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, J. L. Clodfelter said:

If you'll notice in the first video, I set it to 0 and messed with several different settings. Nothing seems to work naturally. There's always some really buggy section.

Doesn't in the first video (pg. 13 – 17) from minute 0:29 to 0:34 the text flow appear as expected? There I only see gaps where additional paragraph breaks are used.