Publisher turned master page spreads into single pages

[stuartbarry]

I have a document which had many master pages as double page spreads. I used these to create my pages. For ease of viewing I switched 'facing pages' off and on several times. The last time I went back to facing pages all my pages appeared correctly as double pages, but all the masters had turned to single pages. I cannot now get the masters back to their original double page spreads. If I start messing with trying to merge by copying and pasting I mess up my real pages. Any idea how I get out of this? I went back to an earlier backup but the problem was still in that one.

[MikeTO]

Hi Stuart, I'd refrain from doing that in the future. Usually when you have a facing pages document you have different left and right margins and perhaps chapter headings that should be aligned one way or the other.

When you turn off facing pages everything will look fine - your facing-pages master page will be split up into two separate masters with the appropriate margins. But when you convert back to facing pages, the master pages will not be rejoined, they will still be single-sided masters. Even so your document should still be okay but when you add a new page spread it will have two right-sided pages because your masters aren't facing pages.

So I highly recommend not converting turning off facing pages just for viewing. As to how to fix this now, the easiest thing would be to fix the masters. Pick a single-sided master to use as the new double and choose Spread Setup and convert it to facing pages. Then copy the objects from the other single-sided master to this one and get it all set up correctly again. Then apply this master to all of the pages and delete that other single-sided master. Repeat for each master you're using of course. It will be a lot of work but once it's fixed you shouldn't have to worry about this again, as long as you don't turn off facing pages.

[stuartbarry]

Thanks. I feared that this might be the answer, but I was hoping that I had missed something. I had already started working through all the masters doing just what you suggested. The only problem is that when I get to one side or the other of a 'split' master where it was linked to a page it unlinks the master and either I lose information or it gets messed up. But it looks as if I'll just have to work through it all and do some re-linking. What a pain. Not a very well designed bit of the application.