From the course: Type Tips

Creating mirrored folios

From the course: Type Tips

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Creating mirrored folios

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- [Nigel] Welcome to Type Tips, my name is Nigel French. In this episode I have some pointers for how we can make the setup of our master pages in InDesign that much easier. To access my master page spread, I'm working with a facing pages document here, the best way is to double click on a master rather than double clicking on either the left or the right-hand page. Doing it this way we make sure that we select both pages of our master page spread. I'll just return to my document pages for a moment and point out that we can also get to our master pages with the keyboard shortcut command or control j. And since this is an A-Master, typing in a as the page to go to. Here I want to add a footer to my master pages, and I want the text frame that contains the footer information to be the exact width of my type area. To make that easier I'll come to my Layout menu and to Create Guides. Add a single row and a single column with the guides fitted to the margin. And you can see that we now have guides around the type area. I'll press t to access my type tool. With these guides in place I can now draw myself a frame from one guide to the next. To insert my page number I can right click, come to Insert Special Character, Markers, Current Page Number. Keyboard shortcut there is command option shift n, or control alt shift n. Now I want to zoom in so I can see what I'm doing, command or control 2, I'll reposition my page. After the page number, which is currently an A because we are on the A-Master page. But as soon as we return to our document pages we will see that as an actual page number. I'm going to insert a larger space than just a regular space. I'm going to use an em space. So I'll right click, Insert White Space, Em Space. And I'll type in the publication name, which in this case I'm calling Master Page Items. Now I could go on and apply other formats to my folio to get it just the way I wanted and then create a paragraph style from that. But I'm going to just fast track now to the next point that I want to make, which is the alignment of the text. And currently this is left align, but I'm going to change it to align away from spine. That's not going to change it's appearance here on the left-hand master page. But when I now zoom out and switch to my selection tool and duplicate this over to the right-hand page by holding down option or alt and my shift key so that I can strain the copy. We see that the text moves to the outside margin. So this is how we can easily create mirrored folios. However, what has not happened is that this information has not reformatted itself, and we need to do this manually. So I'm just going to delete that em space, and I'll select this text, and now I will drag and drop it. But in order to be able to do that I need to make sure I have a certain preference turned on. I'll come to my Preferences and to Type. And then check Drag and Drop Text Editing, Enable in Layout View. And I can now just drag that like so. I'll highlight the space that's here and replace it wit the em space, the keyboard shortcut for which is command shift m. Now when we return to our document pages we see that the page number marker now reflects the actual page that we are on. There then are some useful tips for setting up your master pages.

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