^^I thought of that this morning when I was in the shower but you had already posted.

I swear–sometimes I do my best thinking when taking a my shower first thing in the morning.

Glad you figured it out!

And don’t consider it wasting anyone’s time. You may have helped someone who is looking for the same answer and may come here looking for an answer.

Also–thanks for letting us know you figured it out. I think a lot of posters figure it out and never post back to let us know. Or never post back to acknowledge any advice that was given.

Well, I think “A” is the way it’s supposed to work most of the time.

I was going to set it up for one column and try to split columns in the style sheets, but that doesn’t work.

I think the only solution is separate text boxes, unfortunately.

Hopefully, someone will have a solution and tell me I’m wrong.

^^I agree. It’s not even worth wasting time over. It’s one of life’s mysteries.

I remember the time I was doing a book and in one paragraph the space bands between words were huge. I mean huge. We’re talking em space size. But the sizes were okay, they were regular spaces, no tracking or kerning. Everything totally legit. Was driving me nuts.

I’d copy and paste space bands from other paragraphs into it and still no change.

Did the overrides with no effect.

But when I deleted it and retyped it, there were no problems.

Or when a PDF wouldn’t finish because of one page because ID felt that the anchor paragraph return was “unknown” even though it was a style.

Weird things happen.

I wonder if there is a special accent that is confusing InDesign in the PDF making? Or an “unknown” font mysteriously appearing.

Highlight the entire line and make sure the right font is applied to it and is not blanked out (unless there is an italic font which will blank it out). Don’t laugh–I once had a page that would not print and would halt the PDF-making process because a single space band was somehow turned into an unknown font.

Other times that wasn’t the issue and my solution was to highlight the entire line, copy it to Word, and then paste it (replace) the line in InDesign with it.)

I think something wacky is going on.

EDIT: Since it works when you outline the type, then I really think there is an unknown font somwhere in that line or a character that InDesign is not recognizing. Have you used something like Font Doctor to check font corruption?

If you’re referring to book publishers, they definitely don’t consider it an abomination. What they consider an abomination is a stack of periods. Or a stack of capitalized letters starting a line. Or loose lines caused by what you consider an abomination. Other abominations are three or more line breaks with hyphens. Some don’t like a word hyphenating across pages (and they then complain if the line is loosely spaced). And widows (last line of a paragraph) at the top of a page. Orphans (one word on last paragraph) are allowed so long as they complete words of at least four characters (not including punctuation). But some will mark widows as our mistake even though the it’s an entire word that is 10 characters long. One never knows what to expect.

Peter mentioned a single-letter words, but sometimes we allow them to avoid stacks or a bunch of a’s, A’s, or I’s at the beginning of a line. The publishers don’t like it. They’d rather prefer that a few can end a line in order to break things up.

I do a lot of books and I’m surprised at what some authors, professional proofreaders and editors find abominations or unacceptable. Some find stacks of two periods or columns an abomination, some find “rivers” where there aren’t any. Heck–we had an author insist we hyphenate a word incorrectly because he thought it looked better. And the publisher allowed it!

But I’m talking book publishing and I’m not sure what field you are in so far as InDesign.

I do know that I cringe when I read certain magazines (such as Sports Illustrated and Playboy), because of the hyphenation (they allow two characters down), stacks, super-tight lines or loose lines. And especially widows (last line of a paragraph at the top of the page). Now those things to me are an abomination.

Is is the “regular” type for the font? By that mean, roman or regular, not italic or bold or something. I’m wondering if maybe the italic isn’t coming through or the bold. If that’s the case, it could be an incomplete font.

Since CS6, there has been CC, CC2014, and currently we are at CC2015.

I’ve never used data merge, but may be able to help with your keep together options.

For the first line, tell it to start a new column and keep with the next line.
For the second line, tell it to keep with the previous line AND the next line
Do the same thing for the third line.
For the last line, tell it to only keep with the previous line.

The only problem is that some have section headers or no URLs. I think you’d have to have separate style sheets for the first line and last (i.e., the first line following a section head would not start a new column, but instead would be set up for keep with previous AND next line. And the last line (replacing the URL), would be just to keep with previous.

I don’t know if you can automate that or not. If not, for those with URLs and sections heads, you would have to apply the different styles.

EDIT: I assume you are using paragraph style sheets for all entry lines.