From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Adding page numbering - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Adding page numbering

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- [Instructor] When you're working on a book or a magazine or anything that has more than a few pages, you owe it to your readers to add page numbers. But it's a hassle to add page numbers to each and every page, right? Well fortunately, InDesign makes page numbers easy. In this document, we want the page numbers on almost every document page. So where should we put them? That's right, the parent page. So I'll head over here to my dock and open the Pages panel. Then, I'll double-click on my parent page. I'd like my page numbers down at the bottom of this page. I could put it inside the text frame I already have, but in this case, I'm going to grab the type tool and just draw out a new little text frame. Let's zoom in on this by pressing cmd + 2 or ctrl + 2 on Windows. Now I can type my page number. So what should I type, the actual page number? No, you don't want to type real page numbers here. Instead, you want a stand-in, something that's going to change on every page. And that special character can be found up here in the Type menu. We'll come down here to the Insert Special Character submenu and then look inside the Markers submenu. There it is: Current Page Number. Now, here on this page, it just says A, and that's because we're on parent page A. But don't worry, it's going to change on the document pages automatically. Let's apply some formatting to this by going up to the Control Panel, making sure we're in paragraph formatting move, and then over here in the Paragraph Style pop-up menu, I'll choose my Page # - Left paragraph style. I'll cover paragraph styles and how to make them in a later chapter, but this looks pretty good, though. However, let's go up to the selection tool and drag this down so it aligns better. That looks good. Now obviously, I could duplicate this page number frame onto the right-hand page, but I'll leave that for you to do on your own time. For now, let's just see if these page numbers are working. I'm going to head back to my Pages panel, and I'll double-click on page eight. You can see that the page number showed up just the way we wanted it. If I click on a different page, like 14, it updates there too. And the great thing about these automatic page numbers is that if you later add pages or remove pages, they'll all automatically update. So you never have to worry about it again, which is awesome.

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