I know that virtually everything in InDesign is a plug-in, and therefore virtually everything inside InDesign could theoretically be changed. But DTPtools’ release of a public beta of their Page Control plug-in pushes that limit to a degree that literally made me gasp. The plug-in lets you create custom page sizes inside an InDesign document — yes, more than one page size inside a document! Page 1 could be Letter and page 2 could be A3, page 3 could be the size of an envelope. Wow.
This wouldn’t seem like a big deal except that it’s something that I’ve heard users want in a page-layout program since the early 1990s. QuarkXPress 6 and 7 offer a solution based on merging multiple documents (“layouts”) inside a single XPress document. But this plug-in goes farther and lets you create a three-page spread in which the third page is slightly narrower than the others (so that it will fold into the other two properly when printed).
Now, I need to say that I have only barely used this plug-in, and it’s only a public beta right now… so I am not ready to really review how well it works. But the fact that it works at all is shocking enough to be news to all InDesign users. Take a look and let us know what you think.
[By the way, Page Control was produced with the help of one of our contributors, Pariah S. Burke. Way to go, Pariah!]
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on October 16, 2006
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