I’ve been struggling with a word wrap issue for a few hours and I’m stumped.
In InDesign, I have graphics that are anchored to paragraphs of text. They’re planet graphics on the left, and descriptions to the right, like this: Word Wrap 1. Because each graphic is shorter than the paragraph, the last few lines of paragraph text will wrap under it and continue. Can I make the whole thing a cleaner, two-column layout while still maintaining the anchoring? If possible, I would prefer to avoid having the text in one column and the pictures manually positioned (instead of anchored to their respective paragraphs).
I tried making the wrapping box taller, but while that fixes it for some paragraphs, it breaks it for others – see Word Wrap 2, especially the last two planets (Uranus and Neptune) in the right column.
I’m stumped Is there any way to tell InDesign “I want all text from a paragraph to go to the right side of this anchored image and not have any widows”?
I’d have to go down and fire up ID for a while to find you a good answer, but off the top of my head I’d make the following suggestions…
First, use a two column table for each picture/text pair.
Second… just do whatever works. Unless you have to keep repositioning this material, it doesn’t necessarily need to have a perfect technical solution. (It’s easy to get hung up on unnecessarily “correct” solution when a quick hack will work just as well.)
The table idea might work, thanks! I’ll try that later and report back.
Manual positioning isn’t really an option, though, because it’s an 40-page document and there are several different sections with this problem. Fixing it in one area will break everything else again if we change the content, add new pictures, etc. (which we are doing regularly during this draft process)
I’ll play around in the morning to see if something else occurs to me. No question, though, if a page tool has a broken feature, it will have something to do with frackin’ anchored images.
A possible solution to your issue: If you place your cursor at the beginning of the planet names, so say to the left of the ‘M’ in Mercury, then hit Cmd/Cntrl and the backslash (), InDesign will indent the rest of the paragraph to that same point, so in effect you get an indent for the whole paragraph.
But, a caveat in that I don’t use anchored graphics, so this might affect their placement as well.
You’re a savior, sir! The tables worked PERFECTLY. They even reflow correctly into the next column. Such a simple, brilliant solution that never would’ve occured to me. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
This actually works really well, too! Even with anchored graphics. Even if you change wrapping options afterward. I did this with a second set of icons and it works just as well as the tables, without needing to move text into the cells. I love it too. Thank you!
However, after playing around with it, I find it a bit scary. It forces the paragraph wrap, all right, but does so without creating a single controllable parameter - it does not change paragraph spacing or indent, or create tabs. There also does not appear to be any simple way to change the indent or undo it. Nor does it flag the paragraph as being an unsaved variant (+). Unless I’m missing something, that puts this feature in the “useless junk for corner-cutters” category, which InDesign is blessedly limited in.
It inserts a hidden character (you can also add the indent by going to Type–>Insert Special Character–>Other–>Indent to here.
If you “show hidden characters,” you can then delete the hidden character that forces the indent, move it elsewhere, etc.
I usually use it to hang quotation marks outside of the column in something like a pull quote, but it occasionally has good one-off uses. If I’m designing a one-page print ad (which is the type of thing I usually do) and not a huge multi-page document, things like this are fine…I don’t set up all kinds of paragraph styles for things like that, nor do I need to. If that makes me a “corner cutter” I’m OK with that.
Is there any way to tell InDesign “I want all text from a paragraph to go to the right side of this anchored image and not have any widows”?
