Master InDesign’s Smart Text Reflow

Erica Gamet

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Just how does that Smart Text Reflow work in InDesign, anyway?

For the longest time, people complained that InDesign lacked an automatic text flow feature, similar to the one in Word. When that feature arrived many moons ago, it went practically unnoticed. Still to this day, many people don’t take advantage of InDesign’s Smart Text Reflow. I assume part of that is because it can be a bit clunky to implement and understand. Let’s see if we can fix some of that here, shall we?

Smart Text Reflow adds and/or subtracts pages automatically as text is added or deleted. This makes it ideal for text-heavy longer documents—think page after page of prose, for instance—or if you use conditional text that will change the amount of visible content in the document.

Pre-Sets

To get Smart Text Reflow to work, you need to make sure a few items are in place. By default, the feature is limited to the Primary Text Frame on your master page. You can toggle this setting off (so Smart Text Reflow will apply to any text frame) in Preferences.

• Go to InDesign/Edit > Preferences > Type and go to the bottom of the dialog box, under Smart Text Reflow.
• Check or uncheck the main box to turn the feature entirely on or off.
• De-select Limit to Primary Text Frames to work across all text frames.

Choosing Which Frames to Use

If you are going to use the feature on non-Primary Text Frames, you’ll also need to:

• Manually set up at least two text frames and;
• Those text frames need to be manually threaded across two pages.
• Once you have set those up, Smart Text Reflow will work automatically.

If you are using it on Primary Text Frames:

• To use with facing pages, the Primary Text Frames must be on both the left and the right master pages and those frames need to be already threaded.
• To use on single pages, putting text in a Primary Text Frame on a document page will automatically flow the text from page to page.
• Override the master frame on the document page where you want to initiate the text and the rest will flow automatically.

Other Settings

• Choose where the empty pages will be added: End of Story, End of Document, or End of Section.
• Choose whether or not to delete any empty pages. Pages will only be deleted if the text frame is the only document item on the page. Master page items won’t keep the page from being deleted.
• Choose Preserve Facing-Page Spreads (used only with facing pages documents, of course) to force InDesign to add 2-page spreads when adding pages automatically. If this is deselected, Smart Text Reflow will add single pages.

Remember, this is a document setting. So the changes you make to preferences only apply to the current document. But if you set this up with no document open, it will become the default for all new documents. And, as with any automatic feature, you should fine-tune the settings to fit with your workflow. It can be a little disconcerting to see pages disappear on you when you delete text. That being said, I find that Smart Text Reflow comes in handy with many of my longer documents where I am cutting, pasting, and re-arranging text constantly.