How to Hand Rag Text Without Going Crazy

Did you ever try to manually break a line in a paragraph only to see the whole paragraph—including the lines above where you’re working—suddenly re-wrap? Kind of defeats the purpose of your manual intervention, not to mention it’s bad for your mental health.

Fortunately, it’s easy to make InDesign mind it’s own business and leave the line endings above your cursor right where they are. With your cursor in the paragraph you intend to hand rag, go to the Control panel and choose Adobe Single-line Composer.



The line endings in the paragraph may change at this point, but from then on, you will be in control. And as an added bonus, you may see that there are fewer bad word breaks to fix with the Single-line composer in use.

Paragraph Composer
Single-line Composer