From the course: InDesign Secrets

198 Adding prefixes to page numbers - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

198 Adding prefixes to page numbers

- For a page layout program, adding pages can be surprisingly confusing in InDesign. But fear not, it's not as bad as it sometimes seems. I talked about adding page numbers in my title InDesign Essential Training. But I want to focus now on one aspect of numbering, or adding folios, as some people call them. And that is adding prefixes to your numbers. For example, let's say you want each document in a book to have a prefix? That's just A, B, C and so on. Then the page numbering in the first document, would be A1, A2 and so on. And then in the second document, it would be B1, B2 and so on. To achieve this in InDesign, you need to open the numbering and section options dialog box, for each document in the book And you can get there by choosing it from the Layout menu, but I rarely go to the menu. Instead, I go to the Pages panel, and I double click this little dark gray triangle at the top of the first page. That triangle shows up at the beginning of every section in your document, so if you have more than one section in your file, you'll see it more than once. When I double click on that, up comes the Numbering & Section Options dialog box. So, to add a Prefix to my number, all I need to do is type it into the Section Prefix field. For example, this one will be A-. Now, because we want each document to restart at page number one, I'll also choose the Start Page Numbering At radio button, and then I'll set this to 1. And finally, I like seeing the Section Prefixes inside the Pages panel, so I usually turn on Include Prefix when Numbering Pages. That's it. I'll click OK. If you peek at the Pages panel, you can see that it's immediately updated all these numbers, they now say A-1, A-2 and so on. But I don't see those numbers on my page yet, I'd like to put them down here at the bottom of the page. To do that, I'm gonna jump to Master A by double clicking on it. Now, I wanna put a page number inside the text frame at the bottom. So, I'll select that, let's zoom in to 200%, by pressing command 2, or control 2 on Windows. I'll double click to place my cursor into that frame, and then I'll go to the Type menu, choose Insert Special Character, then choose from the Markets sub-menu, and I'm gonna choose Current Page Number. Of course, if you look keyboard shortcuts, like I do, I would just type command, option, shift, N, or control, alt, shift, N. That places the page number inside that frame. Now, on the Master page, it just says A. But when we go back to the document page, we'll see it update with the prefix. Now, there's various ways to get back to the document pages from this master page. I could double click on the page in the pages panel, for example. But I'm gonna use the go to page dialog box, which I can get to by pressing command J, or control J on windows. Now, I would be tempted to type 1 here, just go to page 1. But unfortunately, that won't work. That's because the page is actually called A-1. The prefix is part of the page name now. So, I would have to type A-1, or, what I usually do, is type +1. +1 means go to the first page in the document, whatever the page number is. When I hit enter, it goes to page 1, and it's not there at all, why? Well, because this is a facing pages document of course, and I put that number on the left hand page. So I'm gonna go back to Master page A, let's zoom back to fit the spread in the window, so I can see both of those. I just pressed command option 0, or control alt 0. And now I need to put the page number on the right hand page, as well. So, I'll click inside that frame, cmd + opt + shift + n, or ctrl + alt + shift + n. And now, I will just double click on page 3, for example, and we'll see that this says A-3. I'll go down to A-4 and A-5, and we'll see that the prefixes are there. Let's go ahead and zoom in, and you can see that better. So, that looks great. Prefixes before page numbers, and all is well in the world. Actually, I should also point out that this even works if I create a table of contents, or an index with this document. It picks up the prefixes for each of those page numbers. That's great, huh?

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