Controlling where paragraphs start and end on a page, in InDesign

Question

I would like the pages of an .indd document to begin with regular text, no paragraphs (nor in the end), and to end with either italicized text or with 2 lines of regular text if the next page has at least one line regular text also. Could someone help me with this?

Good example:

The fox jumps over the lazy dog
User

The fox jumps over the lazy dog
User

Complicated good example

The fox jumps over the lazy dog
User

The fox jumps over the lazy dog
The fox jumps over

Next page

the lazy dog
User

The fox jumps over the lazy dog
User

Bad examples:
(begins and ends with paragraph)

The fox jumps over the lazy dog
User

-
(ends with regular text)

The fox jumps over the lazy dog
User

The fox jumps over the lazy dog

-
(begins with italicized text)

User

The fox jumps over the lazy dog
User

Answer 1

You can do this by setting up your paragraph styles.

From your previous question, it sounds like you're still working on your book of quotations. So I'll be basing the examples off of that. You want two paragraph styles: Quotations, for the plain text, and Author for the italic text.

First, get rid of all the empty paragraphs in your document. As you've discovered, using empty paragraphs to create vertical whitespace is problematic. Instead, make space between paragraphs by setting the "Space Before" option on your Quotations style. ("1p0" is one pica, 1/6 of an inch. Use whatever distance looks good to you.) When you use this method, InDesign will never start a text frame with whitespace.

Then set up the keep options for your Author paragraph style. The "keep with previous" option will make sure that the Author paragraphs are always in the same text frame as the paragraph that comes before them: in this case, Quotations.

Finally, I keep saying "text frame" instead of "page," because that's the object that InDesign pays attention to when applying the keep options. It sounds like you have a simple document where there's only one text frame per page, so the difference is probably moot for you right now. But as you move on to more complex layouts, you can have several text frames per page, and the difference becomes important.