Long Documents in Adobe InDesign
Long Documents in Adobe InDesign
excerpted from Chapter 8 of InDesign 1.0/1.5 for Macintosh and Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide, by Sandee Cohen
There are two types of page layout projects. There are short and single-page projects that designers spend hours and hours painstakingly crafting so that every element is exactly right--and then there are long documents.
Long documents are projects that are one-, two-, three-hundred or more pages such as books, manuals, or magazines. The designers who work on long documents dont have time to fuss with every single element. They need to automate as many page layout functions as possible. Of course, every element still needs to be exactly right!
How do you know when youre working on a long document? Simple, when youve been working so long that youve missed dinner and the end is nowhere in sight and you cant remember a time when you worked on something else--thats a long document!
Adding Blank Pages
The most obvious distinguishing characteristic of long documents is that they have many pages. InDesign gives you several ways to add pages to your document. The simplest way is to specify a certain number of pages before you start your document. You may, however, need to add pages after you have already started work on a document.
To add blank pages, you need to have the Pages palette visible.
To open the Pages palette:
If the Pages palette is not visible, choose Window > Pages to open the palette (Figure 1).
or
If the Pages palette is behind other palettes, click the Pages palette tab. If you need to add just a few pages, you can add them manually.
Figure 1 The Pages palette.
To manually add pages:
-
Click the New Page icon in the Pages palette to add a single page.
-
Repeat as many times until you have added all the pages you need.
Figure 2 Drag a master page from the master page
area of the Pages palette to the document area to
add pages to a document.
or
Drag a master page or a non-master page from the master page area to the document area of the palette (Figure 2).
If you need to add many pages, you can add them automatically.
To automatically add pages:
- Choose Insert Pages from the Pages palette submenu. The Insert Pages dialog
box appears (Figure 3).
Figure 3 The Insert Pages dialog box lets you
add many pages at once to a document. -
Type the number of pages you want to insert in the Pages field.
-
Choose where to add the pages within the document from the Insert list:
-
Choose Before Page and then type a page number to insert the new pages before a certain page in the document.
-
Choose After Page and then type a page number to insert the new pages after a certain page in the document.
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Choose At Start of Document to insert the new pages at the beginning of the document.
-
Choose At End of Document to insert the new pages at the end of the document.
-
-
Choose the master page that the new pages should be based on.
-
Click OK. The new pages appear in the Pages palette.