From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training
Creating and applying parent pages - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training
Creating and applying parent pages
- [Instructor] A parent page, which many InDesign users call a master page, is kind of like a template for your pages. Anything that you put on a parent page will show up on your document pages, and that's why you should use parent pages for things like page numbers, headers, or a logo that you want on all or most of your pages. Now every document has at least one parent page and you can find that in the Pages panel. I'll open that up in the doc over here. There it is, A-Parent. All the parent pages are up at the top of the panel above the Document pages. I should point out that in older InDesign documents, you may see this listed as a Master. To see what's on that master page, you can double click on it. Now because this is a facing pages document, that is it has a left-hand and a right-hand page, I can see that the parent page also has a left and a right-hand page. So anything I put on the right-hand page will show up only on the right-hand pages of my document and anything on the left-hand page will show up on the left-hand pages of the document. If this were a single-sided document, you know, a non-facing pages document, I would only see one page here, and anything I put on that page would show up on all the document pages. Now here we're working with a book and books often have running headers and page numbers. I'm going to be talking about how to add page numbers that update automatically a little later on in this chapter. But for right now, I just want to add some running headers, or I should say footers because it's down at the bottom of the page. I have one down here on the right side that I've added with a section name variable in it. This variable will automatically pick up the name of the section and put it down here in the footer. These kinds of variables are really great, but they're kind of an advanced topic. So if you want to know more about that, check out a title called InDesign: Creating Long Documents by Mike Rankin here in the online training library. But I'm going to make a footer on the left-hand pages. To do that, I'm going to grab the Type tool from the Tool panel and simply click and drag out of frame. When I let go of the mouse button, the text cursor starts flashing inside that text frame and I can type in the name of this book. I happen to have it on my clipboard, so I'll just paste it in. That's very convenient. Let's zoom in by pressing Command or Control + 1. Now I want to apply some formatting to this, and this case I have some formatting already saved in a paragraph style. I talk about paragraph styles in a later chapter. But for now, just follow along and you'll get it. I'm going to go up to the Control panel and I want to make sure I'm in Paragraph Formatting mode. So I'll click this little paragraph icon on the left side. Now over here on the right side, you'll see a pop-up menu for Paragraph Styles. So I'll click on that, come down to the Master Page folder, and I'm going to choose Running Footer - Left. There it is, when I click on it, InDesign applies a whole bunch of formatting to that text. All right, now let's take a look at our document page to see if it worked. Over in my Pages panel, I'll double click down here on pages eight and nine. That jumps to this spread, and we can see that the text that I pasted was picked up from the parent page and put right there on the left-hand page. If I scroll over a little bit, you'll see that the name of the section is added on the right-hand page. So this is terrific because it means I don't have to add my headers or footers manually on every single spread throughout my document, which would be really annoying. Now the problem is that when I added that to my parent page, it applied it to every document page, even in my front matter. Here, take a look. I'm going to jump to page two by double clicking on that in the Pages panel. You can see that that footer shows up on this page as well and I don't want that. So there are a couple of ways to remove parent page items. For example, you could create a new parent page and then apply that to this page. Or in this case, I'm going to apply the [None] parent to this page. To do that, simply drag the word [None] on top of the page. When I drop that on page two, the footer disappeared. You can kind of think of this as removing any parent page from that document page. Now I can tell which parent page is applied to each document page by the little letter in the upper right corner of the thumbnail. See that A? That means that parent page A has been applied to that page, but over here there's no letter, so nothing has been applied to that page. So parent pages are great, but when you start using them, there's one little thing that's going to drive you crazy. You cannot select parent page objects while you're on your document pages. So in the next movie, I'm going to show you how to get around that limitation.
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