One of the nice, take-it-for-granted feature of InDesign is automatic page numbering. Draw a text frame on the master page, use the Type > Insert Special Characters > Markers > Current Page Number command and for the most part you’re good to go. You’ll see a letter in the text frame which will correspond to the master page designation.
But occasionally, you’ll be greeted with an overset text frame, instead. As with all other instances of an overset indicator, the reason is that InDesign thinks it can’t display all of the text. But in this case, InDesign just may be mistaken. When you insert an auto page number character the frame needs enough room to display a 3- or 4-digit page count, even if you only have a four page document. The easy fix is to stretch the frame until the overset indicator goes away but this blog is all about secrets so here’s one I saw posted today on the User to User forum.
Just click the in-port of the text frame with the selection tool. The screen shot below shows identical placeholders on the right and left master pages. Both are overset until the in-port is clicked on the frame on the right page.
Switching to a live spread shows the result is the same there. Overset on the left, fine on the right.
From what I can see this trick works quite nicely for shorter documents but for longer documents it’s important to make sure that you give the frame enough room to display all of your page numbers or the result will be rather messy.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on July 16, 2008
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