How to flow text from one frame to the next across pages
In Layout by Zaweba you thread text frames through their ports, place text with the loaded cursor, and Shift-click to add pages automatically as it flows.
Text frames in Layout by Zaweba link into a thread through their in and out ports. Click the out port of a frame to load the cursor with the rest of the story, then click in another frame or on another page to continue it there. Shift-click flows the whole story automatically and adds as many pages as it needs, while Shift+Alt-click fills only the pages that already exist.
That is the heart of laying out anything longer than a page: one story, many frames, and text that moves along the chain when you edit it. Cut a paragraph on page two and everything after it moves up through every linked frame.
Ports and threads
Every text frame has an in port and an out port. When a story is longer than its frame, the extra text is overset, and the out port is how you send it onwards. Frames joined this way form a thread, and the text runs through them in order. You can thread frames on the same page, such as two columns of different widths, or across pages and spreads.
The loaded cursor and its four clicks
Click the out port and the cursor becomes a loaded text cursor carrying the remaining text. What you do next decides how it flows.
A plain click in an empty column fills that column and stops, so you can place the next part yourself. Dragging draws a new frame of the size you want and fills it. Alt-click is semi-automatic: it fills the column and keeps the cursor loaded, which is handy for working down a magazine story column by column. Shift-click is fully automatic: it keeps creating frames and adding pages until the story has nowhere left to go. Shift+Alt-click is the careful version of automatic, filling frames on the pages already in the document without adding any.
Pick the click by the job. A feature article with pictures in fixed places suits plain or Alt clicks. A novel manuscript suits Shift-click.
Letting the document grow by itself
For long text such as a book, Layout has a better route than threading frame by frame. A primary text frame on a parent page carries the document's main story onto every page that uses that parent. Turn on smart text reflow from the Layout menu and pages are added as the story grows. When the story shrinks, it removes only the pages it added itself, so pages you made by hand for pictures or chapter openers are left alone.
That combination means you can import a manuscript, let it run to the length it needs, and keep editing without managing page counts.
Keeping long stories tidy
Set up columns, margins and the baseline grid on the parent page before you flow anything. Text that fills frames built to the grid lines up across columns and spreads, and changes later are cheap.
Use paragraph keep options and column or frame breaks rather than pressing Return to push text along. Extra returns look fine today and turn into gaps the moment an edit moves things. The special characters in Layout include column, frame and page breaks for exactly this.
Watch the overset warning. Live preflight counts overset text in the status bar, which tells you when a story has text with nowhere to go. A story that ends early, by contrast, shows as empty frames, which preflight can flag too.
When something looks wrong
If text jumps to an unexpected place, the thread order is probably not what you think. Follow the thread from the first frame and relink where it goes astray. If text vanishes after an edit, look for an overset frame at the end of the thread. And if the automatic flow added too many pages, remove the extra frames rather than deleting text; with smart text reflow on, the pages it added will go by themselves.
