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• • January 28, 2022 at 12:32 am #14357044
    Pat Bensky

    Participant

    Using either ID 2021 or 2022, Mac.
    I have a document which contains a selection of hymns. Hymn title, other info, and a PDF of the music.
    There are some very particular requirements regarding the placement of the music, and these are handled by setting up an object style with:
    Anchored Object Options: Custom, x offset 14pt
    Frame fitting options: Fit content proportionally, left and top cropping

    Mostly this achieves the desired result.

    But if the music image happens to land in a certain position, it gets all jumbled up: the flow of the content is interrupted and the image lands on top of the previous image. It’s hard to explain, but here is a small example document:

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/m779elm0qmdscwb/music%20placement%20test.idml?dl=0

    If you go to the last page, select the image on that page, and change the object style to “music left”, you’ll see what i mean!

    I cannot figure out why this happens! It clearly has something to do with the Custom Anchored Object setting. Any suggestions as to how to fix this?
    Thanks!

  • January 28, 2022 at 1:28 am #14357045
    Steve Davis

    Participant

    Make sure you put a page break between your pages, that should sort it out.

  • January 28, 2022 at 2:19 pm #14357089
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I think it works better if you set the Keep Options for the hymn title to “start in new column” (or new page, etc.)
    Something is just problematic about the combination of Keep Options and the fact that the image can’t fit at the bottom of the page, etc.

  • January 29, 2022 at 6:29 am #14357110
    Pat Bensky

    Participant

    Thanks for replying David.
    But we don’t want each hymn to start on a new page or column ):

    I think it’s a bug.

    Pat

  • February 9, 2022 at 10:50 am #14357773
    Nick B

    Participant

    Hi Pat

    I’m a book publisher and come across this all the time. It’s not a bug as such, just an undesirable behaviour.

    David is right in saying that the image can’t fit at the bottom of the page. What’s happening is that the ‘music left’ object style has “Keep within top/bottom column boundaries” checked in the Anchored object options. An object that is anchored such that it sits below the baseline of the paragraph it is anchored in does not affect the vertical space of the paragraph – if the object has no text wrap, it will overlap anything below it. Applying text wrap will push following paragraphs down if necessary, but it doesn’t change the vertical size of the paragraph where the object is anchored. This is the key thing, because it means as you get towards the end of a frame, as long as the paragraph itself fits in the frame then an anchored object extending below beyond the column end does not force it to the next one. Indesign does give the option to keep within boundaries as above and this is generally good for tops of frames but not so much for the bottoms.

    There is a workaround using a table, which is straightforward provided you don’t need text to flow around the graphic. Because tables sit in a paragraph, you can use a paragraph style for positioning, keep options and spacing (and span if you’re working with columns), then create a 1×1 table in the paragraph to contain the graphic (thus it is “anchored” and flows with the text). After you create the table, select the cell and go to Table > Convert Cell to Graphic Cell, then place or paste the content into the cell. You can specify an exact row height in combination with frame fitting options if you want consistent sizes. Bart Van de Wiele did an excellent tutorial on this site that I highly recommend even though it is based on graphics within a larger table, search for Indesign How-To: Place Images in a Table Cell (also on YouTube on InDesignSecrets channel).

    I don’t generally like using tables for layout, but sometimes they are a useful substitute for an object frame.

    Hope that’s of some help.

    Nick

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