Margin disaster in Publisher

[Ryan Clarke]

I have completed my document after weeks of work, only to find out that I have set the margins around the wrong way. Too wide at the spine.

No problem, I thought, I'll just give them the same amount of space at 18.5mm. I then went to the Master document to move the master text boxes in slightly to the spine, left and right.

Then I realised, that during editing, left and right had been swapped around at some point. It happened because I thought Publisher was just pasting the text not the master frame with it. I did not understand the context of the alert it gave at the time. Nevertheless, left and right are mixed up a few pages in after my table of contents.

So, to fix it I had to shift the master text boxes incremently with the ruler to get them right. What made it worse was that my headers were never swapped over and always remained in the same position. I finally managed to line them up.

So this is how my pages now look:

The text

The text is, technically, lined up how I want it now, with equal margins left and right, but it is very confusing to look at. And of course, all the front book matter (which were operating correctly for 10 pages until the mix up) will now need another master page.

Is there another way of fixing this that won't mess up all the work I've already done.

[Old Bruce]

Are you using Master Pages? Are the text frames for the text on the Master page(s)?

If you are just wanting to get ride of the Margins being visually confusing turn off View > Show Margins. Then you'll just see the Text Frames.

[thomaso]

19 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

I have completed my document after weeks of work, only to find out that I have set the margins around the wrong way. Too wide at the spine.

No problem, I thought, I'll just give them the same amount of space at 18.5mm. I then went to the Master document to move the master text boxes in slightly to the spine, left and right.

Your screenshot seems to show this vice versa: the master text frames don't look moved in to the spine but rather towards the outer edges and beyond the margins.

...

However, if the text frame position is as desired, you could use their coordinates from the Transform Panel to set the margins accordingly and get rid of the vertical double lines.

[Ryan Clarke]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

Your screenshot seems to show this vice versa: the master text frames don't look moved in to the spine but rather towards the outer edges and beyond the margins.

...

However, if the text frame position is as desired, you could use their coordinates from the Transform Panel to set the margins accordingly and get rid of the vertical double lines.

Yes. I've just discovered that the last 10 pages of the document suddenly switch back to the correct format again. That's where that screenshot came from. So most of the document has crawled to the right and the rest to the left.

Can you elaborate on this as I don't know what you mean "However, if the text frame position is as desired, you could use their coordinates from the Transform Panel to set the margins accordingly and get rid of the vertical double lines.

Any changes I make to the master pages will not change these out of phase pages. Is there no way of fixing it without having to adjust individual frames. The document is over 300 pages long.

[MikeTO]

You can re-apply the master page to the spread which will move the text frames to match the position on the master.

This issue probably occurred because you inserted, moved, or deleted a single page at some point. Serif doesn't recommend doing that due to the way facing-page spreads work, we should always insert, move, and delete complete spreads.

[thomaso]

48 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

Can you elaborate on this as I don't know what you mean "However, if the text frame position is as desired, you could use their coordinates from the Transform Panel to set the margins accordingly and get rid of the vertical double lines.

If you select a text frame with the Move Tool then the Transform Panel shows its x and y coordinate and its width and height. To make the page margins match the text frame size and position you can use this values to define the margins in the document settings.

51 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

Any changes I make to the master pages will not change these out of phase pages. Is there no way of fixing it without having to adjust individual frames. The document is over 300 pages long.

If the text frames and page margins are transferred from an assigned master page then you should be able and sufficient to define their coordinates on the according master page.

If the objects are detached from master pages (or haven't one assigned) you can massively zoom out and then drag-select all detached frames on the left or right pages to adjust their position.