Reply To: Move pages to another doc – creates alternate layout.

A-HA! Anne-Marie, you solved the second part of my problem. The display was in “by Alternate Layout.” Now everything looks … normal.

But the question remains — how to properly insert pages from another doc, WITHOUT creating an alternate layout?

Whenever I do that, the inserted pages appear as an alternate layout — even though the page numbering flows through the alt layout as if it were in-line. And in “Vertical” or “Horizontal” viewing modes, it looks normal. Something is telling InDesign that the added pages are an alternate layout, though I can’t think why.

If either of you wonderful experts (flattery intended) has a moment of free time to test this, I’d love to know what you see. I’m using dragging or menu commands to move (copy) a string of six pages from doc A to the very beginning of doc B (before pg 1). In Alternate Layout view, it creates a new layout in doc B, starting on pg 1.

If I then drag the new pages within doc B to before the first old page (i.e., from new Layout to old Layout), the old first page jumps over to the new layout, and the dragged pages jump over into the old layout, AFTER the first page. So now I have pg 1 in the new layout, and the rest in the old layout.

No amount of clever dragging can fix this weird behavior, but I can work around it by adding a dummy page to the old layout, dragging the 6 new pages from the new layout to the old layout (between the dummy and the old first page). Now the new pages are in the right place, and the dummy page is all by itself in the new layout, so I delete the dummy page, and that leaves me with one layout and the pages where I want them.

My guess is that this is just a bug that’s too obscure to raise much interest.

Thanks for your helpful and always speedy responses! If you get a chance to test, I’m waiting with bait on my breath. No, that’s not what I meant….

Allen