Editor’s Note: this post was excerpted from Jeff’s handout from CreativePro Week 2018. There’s still time to register for CreativePro Week 2019, or sign up for a Virtual Pass so you don’t miss out!
There’s a reason I love answering questions on the Adobe Forum. Sometimes the best answers to difficult questions involve using features in ways that they were not originally intended. As you really get to know all the features of an application , you can start using these features in unexpected ways to accomplish tasks that may seem impossible.
An example of this is a question from an internet friend from Portugal. He asked, “Is there a way to automatically number pages of a spread using a range of numbers such as ‘Pages 4–5’?”
After a bit of thought, I came up with a simple, yet outside-the-box answer. Use Current Page Number, Previous Page Number, and the Next Page Number Marker (Type menu > Insert Special Character > Markers).
Current Page Number is usually inserted on Master Pages to number pages throughout a document automatically. Next Page Number is inserted to automatically insert the page number of where a story continues on another page in a newspaper, magazine or newsletter. Previous Page Number is used where a story is continued to let the reader know where the story is continued from.
To solve my friend’s problem, I suggested the following:
1. Set up a Master Page spread with a text frame on each page to contain the page numbering.
2. Link these two frames together by clicking on the outport of the frame on the left-hand page then clicking on the frame on the right-hand page.
3. In the first frame, type the word Pages and a space, then insert the Current Page Number marker, next an en dash (as a range separator) and then insert the Next Page Number marker.
4. In the second frame, type the word Pages and a space, then insert the Previous Page Number marker, followed by an en dash and the Current Page Number marker.
The results on a document spread should look like this:
This article was last modified on July 7, 2021
This article was first published on May 27, 2019
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