Problem with columns in the middle of my book

Question

I am writing my second book with Pages 2.02 and have run into a problem with columns. I want to add a long list of items as a list with check boxes for readers to check off. If I paste in enough text for three or four pages of two columns it gets messed up in various ways - the text flows into the following text if I don't use section breaks at the end instead of layout breaks, if I use section breaks it solves that one, but if I add anything to the list it changes all the columns across the pages so that one or several of the pages has way less in the right column than in the left. So far the left column fills the entire page all the time, but the right column has lots of spaces. If I switch back and forth from one column to two, it fixes it. If I add text before the list section it messes everything up again and because there is a section break I end up with a little bit of text on the last page and a huge gap before the single column part that follows.
Does anyone know how to get reliable results that will not mess me up when adding content before the list or in the list itself?
PowerBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

Hi Cymru,
Thank you for thinking about my problems. I guess I s half asleep when I posted and it didn't make sense.
I have so far 77 pages of the book divided into several chapters via section breaks. Inside the 5th section there is almost two pages of paragraphs. Those paragraphs could become 3.75 pages or who knows how long before the list of items. The list of items is 226 items separated by carriage returns and go from one word with 5 characters to 7 words and 34 characters. It needs to be a list with check boxes before them so that the user can check off the items that apply. It is a workbook about turning bipolar into an advantage and is currently 8.5 x 11 and printed on my laser printer for now, but when completed will be more like 8 x 10, so it needs to resize without major hassles.
I have tried every combination of breaks to get the list to flow in two columns, but perhaps have not done the correct combination. I show invisibles and layout. At the end of my paragraphs I do a paragraph return. I then do either a section break or a layout break, followed by a paragraph return and another layout or section break. I then put my curser before the paragraph break, but after the first section/paragraph break, and set columns to 2, evenly divided by default with 3.2026" columns and .3375" gutter, but I want them to change with page size in the future.
Once set up, I copy the text out of BBEdit and paste into the left column. It takes up several pages because it is formatted to do double spaces, so I use one of my styles to make it bold and single spaces. I then apply list style with image bullets and one of the default box images that came with Pages. There are 5 items in each column on the first page because it is close to the bottom, but flows into the next two pages. (with text edits it might end up 20 items in each column on the first page) The second page has 39 items in each column and the last page has 8 items in the left column only, but if with section breaks take up the whole page and the next paragraphs start on the next page. If I then add items to the list, every page gets messed up and the second page ends up with 39 on the left column and less items in the right column for each added item.
If I use layout breaks instead of section breaks, the paragraphs following my lists (now with only one column) end up under the list. What that means is I can see my bold items, but beneath them are my paragraphs that belong after the list. I can see the layout break at the end of the list, but the columns that are shown as part of the 'view layout' are visible right over the single column text also for the rest of the page. The only way to solve that is to go with section breaks and put up with the gap from the end of the list to the following paragraphs.
I hope this makes more sense.
Tom
PowerBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.8)