Type Tips Weekly

- [Instructor] Welcome to Type Tips, I'm Nigel French. And in this episode I have a tip for managing your chapter opening pages when working with long text flows. In this example I'm working with a novel made up of many chapters and I want each chapter opening page to have a bigger top margin, as we see here. Also I do not want the chapter opening pages to have the running header that all the other pages have.

Now a typical way to approach this is to create a second master page that has a larger top margin and no running header and apply that to the chapter opening pages and that works okay until your pagination changes. So let me just show you how that setup works. I'll come to the Pages panel, go to my A-Master page, so I have here my running header and my page number, and then my B-Master page, which is based upon the A-Master page, is the same, except for two things.

No running header and a bigger top margin. And you can see that the B-Master page has been applied to the chapter openers. Now here's the problem. What if the pagination changes? What if after seeing the way the text flows we decide that we would like our chapters to begin not on the next odd page or right hand page as they currently are, but just on the next page, which would save us several pages in this document.

Well, I'll come and edit the Paragraph Style that starts each chapter. And it's called chapter number. This Paragraph Style has a Keep Option associated with it and that sets the paragraph to start on the next odd page. But if I change that to On Next Page we can see that things fall apart. So my solution.

I'm now going to move to another document where I'm using only one of those two master pages. I'm just using my A-Master page. And I'm going to move my chapter openers down using an invisible paragraph rule rather than applying a separate master page to the chapter openers. So this time I'm going to come and edit the chapter number style.

And I'll move this over as much as I can. In fact, let me just cancel out of there, move my document over, and then we'll come to my Paragraph Style Options and my Paragraph Rules. And I want a Rule Above. I'm going to turn in on and I'm going to turn on the preview. Now it's remembering the settings that I was using before, but it's not going to necessarily start out like this.

The key here is that the Color of this rule is set to None. It's going to start out with black and a Weight of one point. Change the Color to None and also the other big change here is the Offset amount. So if I set it to Black and to one point this is how it begins. We want the Color to be None and then we're going to change the Offset to in this case 160 points.

That's because I'm using a leading value of 16, so 10 lines, which is how far I want the chapter to sink into the page is 160 points. And then when I click OK you can see that the chapter openers now begin at the point on the page where I want them to. And I could come and start my chapters on the next page rather than the next odd page.

And that's not going to cause any problems the way it did before. Let me, here we are, we're now beginning on a left hand page. But there remains the issue of the running header. How do we remove this? Well, what we do is we add a second paragraph rule. So once again I'm going to edit that chapter number and come to my Paragraph Rules. And we have two, we're just currently using the first one, the Rule Above, but I can also use a Rule Below.

And when I choose Rule Below and turn this on you'll see that it begins as a black rule on the baseline of the type. Now what I need to do here is make it a very heavy rule and force it up, so that it masks the running header. So let's start by increasing the Weight of the rule and that should do it. And now I'm going to come to the Offset and we need to have a negative Offset in this case, because we are using a Rule Below.

And once the rule covers the running header we can then set its Color to Paper. So using this approach we need only one master page rather than two and no matter what you do with the pagination you won't need to change your pages around, reapplying master pages to them.