Troubleshooting text flow on pages

There might be different reasons for text frames to appear empty:

•No text is linked to the frames. You can check it easily: press Backspace to clear any current article, and then click a frame: if the text name appears on the central part of the bottom status bar, the content is linked to the frames, so there must be another reason why it doesn't appear. If the central part remains empty, no text is linked.

•You do not have permissions to read the text in its current folder.

•The page display is switched to the tracking mode. Switch back to the normal mode.

•The text is white, and the background of the page is white too.

Select all frames where text flows in a wrong order, and then press U to unlink. Click the frame that is supposed to be first, and then press L. Click the frame that is supposed to be second, and then press L. Proceed in this way to the last frame.

Double-click the text just before the big hole, and then press SHIFT+SPACEBAR to display the Text Editor pane. If needed, press ALT+F9 to display tags. Look in few lines below if there is a tag >newarea< or >newarea 1<. If so, remove it.

•Double-click the text where it won't break, and then on the Paragraph spacing and area breaks palette, check if under Unbreakable lines, Starting and Ending fields contain a numeric value. Moreover, check if the Keep with next check-box is ticked. If so, delete the values and untick the check-box.

•If the paragraph is a table cell, or a part of a table, it won't break across columns by design.

See Wrapping text around central image when variable leading is on.

When using "big points" and the baseline lock to grid, the rounding error in Fred4 may cause the text frame height to miss 1 or 2mpts, and therefore to drop the last line of text, although it looks like there's enough space.

The solution is to slightly reduce the starting offset of grid in the format. For example, if the grid value is 9.8pt, put it as 9.799pt or 9.798pt. The visual impact is null, as it's not possible to notice a 2mpt shift, and it would be enough for the last text line to fit the frame.

The following screenshot shows the problem: the last text line doesn't touch the bottom of the frame. The reason is that the text frame height is not divisible by the leading as an entire number.

You can fix it by allowing some variable leading in text. In this example, the variation of leading is =/- 0.5pt.