How do I create a Line Break, Column Breaks & Page Breaks in Adobe InDesign?
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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Hi there, in this video we're going to look at doing Page Breaks and Column Breaks. We do them just so that-- things like this, you can see this heading here, very close to the bottom, I'd like to just actually push it to the next page. Further on, there's probably some worse ones, let's have a look. Almost a big gap there. Say this one here, definitely it needs to be pushed across, but obviously when you start, as earlier on as we can, because if we push this one along, it's going to cascade down, and everything's going to move along. Heading might be a perfect place then.
So let's start with this one, I'm on these three lines here, and you could probably live with it. I want it to push to the next page. I got my cursor just in front of the word Legacy. You'll see it flashing there, I'm going to go up to 'Type', and down here where it says 'Insert Break Character'. There's 'Column Break' and 'Page Break'. 'Page Break' is going to push this to the very next page, and that's not what we want in this case. Move on to pop along to the next column here, not the next page. There's obviously used cases for both. So we're going to go 'Column Break' and you'll just notice that he now is on the top of the next column. This guy here, is kind of a flow on effect where I want you now to go and say 'Type'. 'Insert Break Character', and go to 'Column Break'. Now how do I like these all? These all are looking all right.
One thing you'll notice before you move on, this Paragraph Line is appearing. It's because they're just like a Break Character here, but it's got our Paragraph Style applied to it. That's weird, right? You can have a Column Break Character that does have that applied to it. So what we'll do is, you can either select it, like I have. Just select this little bit, change the Paragraph Style or, just after this full stop here, I'm going to hit 'Delete' key, because what's happening is—
Let's have a look at 'Type'. Let's go to 'Show Hidden Characters'. See that? That little character there. That is the Column Break. So what we're going to do is-- and it's got a Subheading Paragraph Style applied to it. I'm going to go 'Delete' key and there he is right there. Still having its own line, with a Paragraph Style applied. You can also see here, I got this guy. He's called an orphan, or widow, can never remember which one. But he's being pushed all by himself, and he's a big old lonely guy at the end of this one. That looks a bit wrong. So I could put in some Column Break just to push that along, but actually it's easier probably just to grab this and push this along a little bit until I'm kind of happy. I'm just kind of pushing it to the left till a couple of lines appear because that makes no difference to my design, I feel. It still looks fine, kind of hang in there, or you could do the opposite, and bring it in that way, so that it's not pushed to one side.
Now, with the Column Breaks, and Line Breaks-- we're doing this quite late in the tutorial, it's because it's one of the last things you want to do. You do not want to be doing this earlier on because if you make any text changes these Column Breaks are not going to make any sense. If I go and add a bit of copy at the top here, everything is going to be offline again. So it's kind of the last thing I do, it's just check, check.
I added some space in here earlier on in this tutorial. Get rid of him, clean him up. Everything's looking okay. Down, down, down. I'm going to give up now. They all look pretty good. Remember, we didn't bother with too many things later on. So that is a Column Break, Page Break's the same. In the same place, but it will obviously push it to the next page.
One thing we'll do just to tidy up things before we leave is that, I forgot this page here. I'm going to click on him, select everything on this page. I want it to actually be on this page here. I just got it on the wrong page. So I'm going to go to 'Edit', 'Cut'. So I've cut it all, then I'm going to double click on the page I want it, page 4. Now we go to 'Edit', and there's one-- I could just hit 'Paste', and that puts in the middle of the 'Spread' which is not cool. I want to go to 'Edit', and there's one called 'Paste in Place'. Nice. All these we'll make slightly different later on when we do the Contents page. But that's why I want that image. Again, that is Page Breaks and Column Breaks in InDesign.