Inset anchor design ideas

We may not be aiming for the same thing, but while I use an :anchor style to hold table anchors and a range of :fig styles for figures – indented in a list, body text indent, page width – I quickly decided against trying to manage pairs of before/after styles. For the level of finesse I require, the table definition(s) handle the space after tables and the :figcap style (all my graphics have captions below) the space after graphics.

Text insets are a different challenge; trawl through the forum and you should be able to retrieve some useful information. I need to brush up on them myself for a new project; it's the phantom paragraph at the end of insets that bugs me most

A word on text insets, and thank-you for raising the question :-} After this morning's research and testing, I'll be using a single style for insets the same way that I do for tables.

The problem I often ran into before, reported/posted by several people, was that using a text inset introduced an (infuriating, undeletable) extra paragraph after the inset. In the worst case, this picked up a heading format and introduced blank entries in the ToC. Altogether not good!

• One suggested answer is to make sure there is a non-breaking space, an en space or an em space between the insertion point – where the cursor is at the moment you go for File > Import file – and the end of the paragraph. I've had this work sometimes, but not always.
• A second suggestion (from or reported by Error7103, so bound to be good) is to modify the style of the last paragraph of the inset: check the Paragraph Format group and set it to Run-In Head with no default punctuation. This works like a charm!
  It also explains, to my satisfaction, where the problem comes from: the paragraph where you insert the inset has (of course) a paragraph mark, and so does the last paragraph of the inset.

To retrieve the full thread, search for "Unremovable added paragraph entry in text frame".