Containers and Page Breaks, Suggestions Wanted

March 4, 201411 yr

I am working on a catalog printout with the name and description in the left hand column and an image in a narrow right hand column. While the description is often short, it is sometimes extremely long. I would prefer to allow these long descriptions to break across pages, but I'd like the accompanying image to not break across the page.

I want something that I believe FileMaker cannot deliver by default: something like a conditional page break. I'd like a page break if the remaining space on the page is not enough to accommodate the container. If the the container can fit, then allow the text to flow onto the next page.

My understanding is that "Allow part to break across page boundaries" cannot be made conditional and it is an all-or-nothing situation.

Would anyone know of a suggestion to his problem? Some kind of layout trick or plugin that could assist?

March 5, 201411 yr

jayivan

How often do you print this catalog or is it a large data set many pages and are you using the output for digital or offset publication?

The reason i ask how often is because if it is several times a year then the investment in the plugin that i'd recommend would pay off

otherwise there can be a way to do it with exporting XML data and imported in to inDesign.

Or with an InDesign Plugin EasyCatalog

Let me show you what i mean...

There is also another option using ScriptMaster and iText jar library to export the data and basically Draw the PDF's but its a much trickier proposition.

March 7, 201411 yr

Author

Thank you for the suggestion. That workflow may actually be quite useful for another project I'm working on which currently using tagged text exports from FileMaker placed into InDesign.

But for this project, I do need to keep it internal to FileMaker if at all possible.

So, still looking for suggestions for a method to allow parts to break across pages but keep containers whole on one page.