i'm having trouble keeping paragraphs together in linked text boxes

[sschardan]

I have a job that has two text boxes linked together, and they are printing side by side. These boxes are returning up to 9 different paragraphs consisting of a bullet point, title, and 1 to 3 lines of body copy. Each bullet, title, and set of body copy is controlled by their own individual rule, and all 27 rules are placed into the linked text frames.

 

It is set up this way so I can easily re-color each individual rule as it is used across multiple versions of base art, all requiring different color breaks.

 

When the returned data flows into the linked text boxes, is there any way to prevent the paragraphs from splitting between the text boxes? I have tried various settings in the "widow" setting within the text frame editor, but that is not working.

[Dan Korn]

Setting widows to 99 for each paragraph should work.

 

Also, you didn't ask about this, but you could probably centralize the logic from those 27 different rules into one block of code in OnRecordStart with calls to FusionPro.Composition.AddVariable().

[sschardan]

That did it Dan, Thank you.

[sschardan]

I completed the job in question, and since I have never used FusionPro.Composition.AddVariable() and I already had all my rules built I did not pursue it.

 

However, now I am intrigued as to how to use it! I looked in the pdf documentation, but there isn't much of anything there. Is there anything you could point me to so I can learn how to utilize this in the future?

 

Thank you

[Dan Korn]

I completed the job in question, and since I have never used FusionPro.Composition.AddVariable() and I already had all my rules built I did not pursue it.

 

However, now I am intrigued as to how to use it! I looked in the pdf documentation, but there isn't much of anything there. Is there anything you could point me to so I can learn how to utilize this in the future?

Well, if you search for "AddVariable" here on the forums, you'll find several examples. This kind of "variable injection" can be very handy when you have a series of rules, especially if they're simple iterations, like "Para1Rule", "Para2Rule", etc. You can generally take all the logic from those multiple rules and replace them with calls to FusionPro.Composition.AddVariable(), or FusionPro.Composition.AddGraphicVariable(), in a loop in OnRecordStart.

 

You can also iterate through all of the existing fields in your job, apply some kind of modification to them, and then "re-inject" the values for those variables, as in this post and this post.

 

There are a lot more things that you can do as well. Some more complex jobs, with iterative kinds of layouts, lend themselves better to this more abstract way of populating the frames on their pages than other jobs which are more "mail merge"-type jobs which typeset data fields directly.