From the course: InDesign Secrets

161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items

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- [Voiceover] When you're working with a long document like a magazine or a catalog, it's really important to keep track of what's happening with repeating elements like headers and footers on your document pages. I want to give you a couple of tips on how to manage footers, specifically page numbers, when they become obscured by other elements on the page. So here we're looking at a magazine spread, and the footers are behaving nicely. They're in the white area at the bottom. Plenty of room to read them and the footers are coming from the master page. You can tell because I can't select them here, and they are bordered by this dotted green outline, and the dotted outline tells me that it's coming from a master page. So it's been properly set up. Your footers and headers should always be coming from the master page. And if we look at the master page, we can see the original items, and that they have a current page number placeholder. So it's working perfectly fine for this spread. Let's look at a different spread. If I come to this spread, you can see that it's obscured by this picture on the left. On this spread, it's obscured by the picture and the background color. Now the fix for that is to move the folio to a layer that's higher than where the my page backgrounds and my images are going to appear. Using the "Layers" panel just for creating one layer, just for your master page items, is a good idea. So here we can see the designer did use a number of layers, but they left the master page items on the bottom. So I'm going to move those above background, and above picture. And now we can see, here they are. They appear just fine. One problem, though, is that the master page folio on the left might be a little hard to read, being dark. But let's see if it's going to hurt anything else. Over here, that's pretty hard to read. Maybe if we made it a different color. Or especially on the front spread. The footers do appear above the picture, which is good, but they're really hard to read, which is bad. So what we want to do is make them a different color. There's two ways you can go about this. One is you can override by "Command+Shift+Click", or "Control+Shift+Click", which I'll do to one of these, which allows me to edit it. It frees it up from being on the master page, and then I can select the text, and color it. But, in general, I'm philosophically opposed to overriding master page items. I would prefer to just apply a different master to this page. So I'm going to "Undo". And I just did "Undo Override Master Page Items". And, by the way, if you're not sure if something's been overridden on the page, here's where it's hiding: in the "Pages" panel menu, in "CC" it's now part of the "Master Pages" flyout. So here you can choose "Remove All Local Overrides". In earlier versions of InDesign, "Remove All Local Overrides" was part of the main panel menu. I have already created another master page called "Lightfooter", as you can see. It's based on Master Page A, but the only thing that's different is that I have colored the type white, or paper, and the rule above it is also paper. If I look at the "Swatches" panel, you can see the type is colored with "Paper". So let's go back to "Pages", come back over here, and now I just want to apply a different master to this page, and this page as well. That looks great. By dragging and dropping just one page at a time, instead of the whole spread, you have complete control over how you want these to appear. So, on this page for example, I might want the footer on the left to be white. So I'll drag this guy right on top of page 50, and there you go. So we have a light-colored footer on the left, easy to read, and a dark-colored footer on the right, also easy to read. By using master pages and layers intelligently, you can gain control over the headers and footers in your long documents.

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