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I am currently doing a 350 page book typesetting and layout project. Although I have done this before, I tend to not use In Design for long periods of time between each project and then forget some very important features. These features become extremely important for dealing with long documents. I am going to write down some fundamental things I learned today so that I do not forget again and hopefully I’ll help someone else searching for the same solutuion.

Master Pages

You must understand master pages in order to deal with any document bigger than 3 pages. That’s the rule of thumb. Master pages are not that difficult to master ( in contrast to the name! ).

You can have many master pages and apply them to different sections of your book (common in magazine design) but for something like a novel, you tend to only need one or two. In the example above I have 2 custom master pages – one for the main pages called ‘A-main-doc-pages’ and one for chapter heading pages called ‘B-ChapterHeadings’. The idea of master pages is to setup all the basic layout rules and elements that you wish to be applied to pages within your document. For this project my main master pages contain the page numbering object for left and right pages, the margins… and that’s it.

You import your multipage word (or any other format !)  text document, holding down ‘SHIFT’ as you drop it on to page one and In Design auto generates the number of pages you need, creates text boxes according to the masterpage guides you set up and ‘ Hey presto’ your book is ready to be styled with paragraph styles and character styles etc. Now what happens if after you have done lot’s of work on it, you decide you want the bottom margin of every page to be 4mm higher? This is something that happened to me. I wanted more white-space at the bottom of each page.

Changing your mind about the layout / columns / margins – here’s what you need to know:

When you go to your master page, you select ‘Layout > Margins and Columns’ from the menu. You alter the bottom margin to 16mm from 18mm. This changes it on the master page. However, it will NOT change it on all the existing text-fields, it will only change the guide – NOT the content that is already there. Don’t panic, there is a great solution.

Layout Adjustment…

Now here’s the secret. Go to ‘Layout > Layout Adjustment’ and tick that wanderful box that says ‘Enable Layout Adjustment’. Once this is done, you then go back to ‘Layout > Margins and Columns’ and edit whatever it is you wish. In my case it was ‘bottom margin’ by 2mm. Then the magic happens and ALL text fields under that ‘Master Page’ will adjust to fit within the new guides. If you have graphic objects such as photos in your book, you can select ‘Allow Graphics and Groups to Resize’ and any objects which within the layout will shift into the new margin accordingly.