This week is another great tutorial on how to set up automatic page numbering in Adobe InDesign.
If you’ve been following along with my new series of beginner InDesign tutorials, you’ll love this next one!
Watch the tutorial below for a quick tutorial on how to set up automatic page numbering in Adobe InDesign. Or keep reading for the notes from the video tutorial, if you prefer to read the tips. And if you’re a fan of YouTube, click here to subscribe to my channel for more design tutorials and tips!
NOTE — In 2021, Adobe renamed their "Master Page" tool, it is now called "Parent Page". This is to better reflect the company's core values of diversity and inclusion. As this is a core tool in InDesign, it may take awhile to see the change reflected everywhere in Adobe, as well as in my own trainings + tutorials.
The best place to put a page number is on a parent page (formerly master page). A parent page is like a mini-template that is great for any repeated content that you want to show up on every page like headers, footers, backgrounds, and especially page numbers.
I’ll open the Pages fly-out menu first – if you don’t see that option on your screen, you can go to Windows > Pages.
At the top of this window it lists out your parent pages, and below this line is all the actual pages in your document. Double click on your parent page to make changes to it.
On the parent page, I’ll draw a text box, but don’t type anything in it yet. Instead, with the cursor flashing, go to Type > Insert Special Characters > Marker > Current Page Number.
This will place an A as a placeholder here on your parent page since this isn’t an actual page in your document.
I’m going to make the font size obnoxiously large just so you can see it clearly for this tutorial.
So click back your first page in your document, and as long as your parent page is applied to a page, that page number will show up. And as we scroll through the rest of our pages, the page numbers are automatically populated.
The best part about this tool? If you add more pages or rearrange any pages, it will automatically renumber your pages for you, so you never have to worry about them getting mixed up. How cool is that?!
Want to learn more about InDesign? Check this out 👇
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