This InDesign tip on the easy way to print a page range in InDesign was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on January 19, 2017.
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You might know that you can print a range of pages from a document by typing in the range in the Print dialog box.
But this can be tedious and lead to errors, especially if you’ve added section prefixes to your pages (which must be typed in the Range field). Happily, there’s a much quicker and easier way to tell InDesign which pages you want to print.
Just select the pages you want to print in the Pages panel. You can Shift-click to select a contiguous range, or Ctrl/Command-click to select (or deselect) individual pages.
Then, from the Pages panel menu, choose Print Pages.
You can also right-click on any page in the panel and choose Print Pages from the menu at your cursor.
The Print dialog box opens up and the range is already inserted for you!
Note: If you’re working with a non-facing pages document, the command will appear as “Print Spreads” instead of “Print Pages”, but it works just the same.
This article was last modified on August 8, 2019
This article was first published on January 24, 2017
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Fantastic tip but is there any way to take it a step further and bypass the dialog box altogether? So it would print with the default settings that are already set from the last time you printed the document.
Sorry Bren, not that I know of. Maybe someone has written a script that can do that.
Hi Chad,
with InDesign CS6 (and all other versions) you always can work with “absolute” page numbers:
Example 1:
+5-+10
would print page 5 to page 10 of the document.
Regardless of page name.
Other examples:
+5-
pages 5 to the last one of the document.
-+5
pages 1 to 5 of the document.
And there is a preference where you can set the Pages panel to show absolute page numbers if you like: Not in the Pages panel unfortunately but under Preferences > General > Page Numbering.
Btw. Absolute numbering is working with InDesign’s Export functionality as well.
This is THE most fantastic tip (i.e. +5 etc. for absolute numbering) EVER!! Thank you so much!!
That would be useful, I wish CS6 would do have this feature.
Wow, that’s a life saver when you need to print pages on the fly, especially when you numbered your pages differently. Great tip!
A great tip Mike, especially since the reintroduction of a bug in CS5.5 where, if you incorrectly typed a page range in the Print dialog box (i.e., page out of range, or you typed a period instead of a comma), InDesign will warn you, and then unhelpfully remove everything you typed. I filed a bug about this after CS2 and the behavior was changed so that you could edit the page range without it all being deleted. I resubmitted the bug after it was reintroduced in CS5.5, but it has yet to be corrected.