Applying different styles to lines separated by soft return.

[chi wail72431016]

Hi friends

jist read a similar thread, but it got increasingly complicated. What I took away from that thread was that try to avoid using soft returns as much as possible. Is that true and why so?

so I was trying to split a line into two, and used a soft return to keep them together as it they were in the same paragraph. But what happened was that I could format the two lib s differently. The fo St line was justified and the second became justified too, so it looked really loosely bound. I tried to justify the first line and tried to align left thwith second line, but I was unable to apply dofferent formatting to both of them.

What would you do?

[John Mensinger]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/chi+wail72431016  wrote

What would you do?

Not use a soft return, particularly in a paragraph set to full-justify.

There are many possible remedies to this problem; adjusting the column size, justification settings, No Break, anchoring a nested text frame, etc., but choosing the best or correct one is situational. If you can offer more contextual detail and/or a screenshot, it would be easier to offer specific advice.

[SJRiegel]

Why not use a regular paragraph return if you need different formatting? As long as there is no paragraph spacing applied between the two they should still look like they are together.

[Laubender]

Hi,

justification is a paragraph attribute.

You have to use Left Justified or Right Justified depending on the used script.

Only the last line in a paragraph can be controlled differently if justification is stet to Justified.

Regards,
Uwe

[AnneMarie Concepcion · Accepted solution]

A soft return lets you manually break a line into two lines without creating a new paragraph. The problem is if you edit the text in the first line, the soft return remains (instead of the line breaking/rewrapping naturally) and it can look stupid. A lot of work to keep reviewing your text to see if there are any stupid-looking lines you need to fix. Thus most people avoid soft-returns and use other methods to keep lines together or modify line breaks.

To solve your justification problem, note that you can only make last/final line in a paragraph left-aligned if the rest of the paragraph was justified. If you're trying to make a line in the middle of a paragraph left-aligned to solve ugly spacing issues (which are occurring because your soft return is severely limiting InDesign's ability to equalize word spacing by changing the line breaks) you will have to use a hard return instead, and split the paragraph into two.

To keep two separate paragraphs together in the same page or column, use Keeps settings (Control panel menu > Keep Options... or in your paragraph styles):

1. First, to keep all the lines in a paragraph together without splitting across columns  or frames/pages, apply the Keep Lines Together: All Lines in Paragraph option to it.  Apply this to both paragraphs if you don't want either to split. 
2. Then, click inside the first paragraph and turn on "Keep with  Next 2 Lines" (the default, or even just 1 line will work) as shown in the screen shot below. This will force ID to jump the 1st paragraph to the top of the next column if the any part  of the 2nd paragraph ends up there. Don't apply the Keep with Next Lines setting to the 2nd paragraph, only to the first. 

Hope that helps!

AM