Adding Pages in the Middle Causes Content Displacement

[daniel.c.gallagher]

 

Hey there!

I'm making a rock climbing information book and I frequently need to add pages into the middle of the document. My problem is when I try to add a page, some contents get moved around (mostly to outside of the pages)

Here's the before screenshot:

And here are two screenshots from after I add one page to the middle:

You can see in the pictures that some pages are left completely unaffected, some page are partly affected, and some pages have their entire contents moved to outside the page areas. Additionally, this happens across the whole document after where the page was inserted.

A few extra notes:

• Each page is grouped into a single layer, but when a page is "partly affected" the layer will be split up
• The same happens when I drag a page from later in the document
• The precise effects of adding a page is not consistent
• Very rarely a page is added without affecting the other content
• command-z will remove the just-added page but will not accurately put all of the assets back in their original locations

I think my question is obvious: Is there any way to avoid shifting content when adding a page in the middle of the document?

Thanks in advance!

[RM f/g]

If I get it right you inserted one page.

Better insert two pages: one spread.

[daniel.c.gallagher]

On 2/5/2022 at 10:31 PM, RM f/g said:

If I get it right you inserted one page.

Better insert two pages: one spread.

Thanks. If I recall correctly, adding two pages (one spread) caused the same problem at some point before, but with less frequency. At any rate, it worked now and there was no shifting of contents. However, if I delete a single page, the same problem occurs. And ultimately, I need one additional page in the middle, not two... So do you think it's just not possible to add only a single page without everything going haywire?

[RM f/g]

I ran into this phenomenon a few times back in my Indesign days. It taught me not to insert an odd number of pages in a document with two page spreads.

Inserting an even number of pages never gave any trouble.

Whenever I do  need a single page inserted, I insert two pages and manually move content to the extra blank page.

If there is a way to insert a single page into a document with two page spreads without these challenges, I would like to know as well.

[MikeTO]

Are you using the Float option? It's the only way I'm aware of to create this problem but perhaps there's another way.

For example, put some text in a page on the right page of a spread. Draw a box and click the Float button. Ensure the anchor is in the text frame on the right page. Drag the box to the left page of the spread. In my example below this is the red box and it's anchored to the text frame on the right page.

Now if I insert a page before the right page of the spread you'll see the red box is on the canvas to the left of the next spread. This is because I told Publisher to position the object a specific X and Y distance to the left and below its anchor in the text frame. For this scenario, the solution is to ensure you never Float an object onto a different page than its anchor. If you need to move the object to another page, move its anchor, too. You can drag object anchors with the Move tool.

 

[daniel.c.gallagher]

Thanks so much for the replies MikeTO and RM f/g!

As for MikeTO's suggestion, I checked and it seems that I did not had the float option on at all. So doesn't seem to be the issue.

However!! While continuing to snoop around (and thinking about the odd behavior of the tables and images being separated), I tried grouping every asset on each page. Doing so fixed the problem!

Before adding one page:

After adding one page:

 

Previously I had been "grouping" together assets on each page into a single layer per page rather than right-clicking on the document to group them. I guess there is some different behind-the-scenes mechanism for these two options and for whatever reason, putting assets into a common layer (although allows you to move the whole layer as a single asset) does not formally group them in such a way so as to avoid separating the assets while adding an odd number of pages.

I don't really understand how the anchors work in Publisher, but maybe grouping assets reassigns the anchor in such a way to avoid the problem.

 

Anyway, problem solved! Thanks for suggestions!

[RM f/g]

Good to know. I'll keep this in mind.

Thanks for sharing.

[Publos]

+1, my solution has been to always group everything on a page, so that if it does move, I can just move a single group rather than all of them at once.

Also, if I don't group items, sometimes they appear waaaay off page (like ±1000p) after I've been moving pages around for a while.

[Alberto Poli]

On 2/9/2022 at 7:45 AM, Publos said:

+1, my solution has been to always group everything on a page, so that if it does move, I can just move a single group rather than all of them at once.

Also, if I don't group items, sometimes they appear waaaay off page (like ±1000p) after I've been moving pages around for a while.

ok, it is a solution but it is not the correct way to work.

[Twolane]

If I am to understand Lock (Ctrl-L) correctly: (Please feel free to move this to a separate topic if necessary)

I am preparing a text book (no images), for Amazon POD. Of course, my chapter pages have no header text (Author/Title), thanks to a blank Master Page I have inserted overtop. I'm to understand Ctrl-L will lock in that page setting, no matter how many pages I add anywhere in the manuscript, if I have locked the chapter pages. Is this correct?

I've experimented and this seems to be the case, but before I go ahead and lock all the chapter pages, I would like confirmation. "Lock" in Help does not come up with anything. If this is in fact true, you have no idea how great that is. It will save so much time reformatting every time I add or subtract manuscript pages in my draft.

 

[MikeTO]

31 minutes ago, Twolane said:

If I am to understand Lock (Ctrl-L) correctly: (Please feel free to move this to a separate topic if necessary)

I am preparing a text book (no images), for Amazon POD. Of course, my chapter pages have no header text (Author/Title), thanks to a blank Master Page I have inserted overtop. I'm to understand Ctrl-L will lock in that page setting, no matter how many pages I add anywhere in the manuscript, if I have locked the chapter pages. Is this correct?

I've experimented and this seems to be the case, but before I go ahead and lock all the chapter pages, I would like confirmation. "Lock" in Help does not come up with anything. If this is in fact true, you have no idea how great that is. It will save so much time reformatting every time I add or subtract manuscript pages in my draft.

It depends on your document setup. Master pages are assigned to a specific page so if all of the text in your document is a single story (text in a series of linked text frames) that spans multiple chapters, then no, it won't work. If you add more text before a chapter page then you could end up with text from the previous chapter on the page with the chapter title master applied to it.

Alternatively, if you make each chapter its own story you can avoid masters being applied to the wrong pages. My preferred page setup, ignoring front matter, is a spread with the chapter title master applied to it followed by regular spreads, repeated for each chapter. If I later add more text to a chapter, it could cause the story's text to be overset in the last text frame. This is easy to catch with Preflight and you can just shift click its overset icon and Publisher will automatically insert more spreads. This works perfectly, because the newly inserted spreads will have the same master pages applied as the overset page and the chapter title on the next spread will not be impacted. If you delete text you can wind up with a blank spread at the end of a chapter and preflight will not warn you about this. You'll have to catch those manually and delete them.

[MikeTO]

Oops, I may have provided advice for the wrong question, sorry about that. I'll leave the post as is in case it's helpful.

I don't use Lock so I'm no expert but my understanding is that it locks the layer for editing and has no impact on pagination so it would be of no use in keeping your chapter titles assigned to the right pages.