I am putting together a collection of music pieces for publication. Each piece begins on a new page but several of them occupy two or more pages (up to a dozen or fifteen pages in one or two instances). They are all in a book (using InDesign’s book feature) with the “chapters” containing all the pieces that begin with a particular letter of the alphabet — 21 “chapters” in all (not many pieces have names beginning with Q, U, X or Z). At the moment there are around 450 pieces of music spread across some 750-odd pages.
Here is my problem: Each piece of music is numbered (sequentially) and, when a piece has more than one page, the numbers on those pages are given an alphabetical suffix — eg., 235a, 235b, 235c. Each number is shown in a text frame across the top of the page and is centred in that text frame. So far, so good.
But, having put most of the book together, I then, unexpectedly, needed to add an additional piece of music (just one page) immediately after item 35. That meant re-numbering (increasing by one) every number from there to the end of the book. Aaaaargh! Page-by-page for 700+ pages!
I have tried to think of some simple way to build in an automatic adjustment in case I need to add yet another number in the middle of the sequence later on — but so far without success. I thought of linking their respective text frames so that adding a new page and inserting a new number text frame into the sequence would move that number and all the subsequent numbers forward one page. But that does not allow for those numbers having alphabetical suffixes. The suffixes then need to move to the next number. Confusing, huh?
Any suggestions, gurus?
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