Skip to the Leading, My Bonny Loose

I cut my teeth on desktop publishing: QuarkXPress 1.0, PageMaker 1.0… anyone remember Ready, Set, Go? But I was baffled when I recently opened InDesign after several months of not touching it. While delighted with its new performance and new EPUB features (which have made it far simpler than even a year ago to produce a workflow for a single document to head to print on demand, PDF, and EPUB output), I had a problem. The captions below anchored-object figures were snapping to some unseen grid.

Here, for example, was what I was seeing:

The red arrow above is pointing to the wrong amount of space. I knew it was wrong — the proper amount of space was smaller — and trying to change the amount of space was fruitless.

Using the InDesignSecrets forums, Adobe’s help forums, and other pages I found across the web — and my slightly out-of-date knowledge — I tried all the usual culprits. Were the Anchored Object settings out of whack? No. Did I have Align to Baseline Grid set in the paragraph style or through an override? No. Was something wacky with Text Wrap? No, no, no. I spent an hour trying to sort this through to no avail.

Fortunately, an old friend suggested Skip by Leading, in the Composition settings of InDesign’s Preferences dialog box. Sure enough: it was selected and deselecting it solved the problem. Less space now, see?

The Skip by Leading feature is not new — it’s been around in page layout apps since the ’90s. It ensures that even with a text wrap, and even without a baseline grid defined, paragraphs remain in integral units of the leading you set. Of course, I should have guessed this, but I had completely forgotten about it, hiding deep in the preferential depths.

In a book destined for print, Skip by Leading makes a lot of sense. But in this particular book, designed primarily to be read in EPUB and with other looser parameters, I had avoided use a baseline grid or other options to preserve perfect alignment across pages. Even in a PDF, I don’t expect people to use facing pages, and in a reflowing EPUB, there’s no concept of that. Print-on-demand users might see some slight variation, but not much. The fussiness wasn’t worth the overhead compared to having a flexible and perfectly flowing document.

My problem with Skip by Leading isn’t that it exists. Rather, that there’s no visual or palette display to let you know it’s in use, and that it’s hidden deep enough so that most InDesign users never consider disabling it.

That’s an hour I’ll never get back, but with my friend’s help, mystery solved — and I hope some of you are smacking your head right now (or in the future) as a lightbulb goes on about an inexplicable leading issue you’ve had in the past.