Making Split Columns honor Keep Options

Keith Gilbert

2

If you have InDesign CS5, and you have the text frame below…

…you can use the new “Split Columns” feature to make the body text split into 2 columns, like so:

But unfortunately when you use the Split Columns feature, InDesign ignores any Keep Options that are applied to the text. In the example above, I have these keep options applied to the body text:

Note that the highlighted paragraph isn’t been kept together within a column as it should. Hopefully, this will be fixed in a future release. But in the meantime, here’s a workaround that will work in some situations.

For a situation like this, instead of using a single column frame that contains body text that is split into two columns, use a two column frame that has the headline set to “Span 2 Columns”.

Now the Keep Options are preserved for the body text.