Using Keep Options in your style sheets will help you find the perfect balance for your layout.

Leaving one line at the end of a column looks pretty crap, so does starting a page with the last few words of a paragraph. Keep Options regulate how many lines in a paragraph will stay or be allowed to flow over when it is split over columns or pages.

It also ensures that your copy will re-flow properly and you won't have random paragraph breaks after a copy edit (the best reason in my opinion).

Another way to use keep options is with paragraph headlines. Even though your headline and the following body copy are two separate paragraphs, you can prevent them from ever breaking apart from each other. That's well behaved copy if you ask me.



Keep with next X lines
Use for paragraph headings, and set to 1, then the heading will ALWAYS stay bang on top of the paragraph following it. To be safe, select All Lines in Paragraph. This will ensure any heading with more than one line, will not be broken.

Keep lines together
To keep a paragraph from breaking over columns choose All Lines in Paragraph.

At Start / End of Paragraph
This is where you control how your paragraphs will break. Allowing 3 or more lines for start and end will lessen the appearance stranded lines.

Start Paragraph
I've used this for book chapters or story titles, by setting it to jump to the next right hand page.

I mean, who wants to run through a document and tidy text up all the time? Let InDesign do the work for you. Keep options are a huge time saver. It takes 2 seconds to add them to your style sheets, and could really save you valuable time.

Paragraph settings without and with keep options applied.