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• • July 2, 2021 at 7:01 am #14340792
    Allen Cobb

    Member

    I need to move 6 pages from doc A to the beginning of doc B.

    When I move the pages, they show up in Doc B as an alternate layout. They are paginated at the beginning, but I need them to be in the direct flow and not as an alternate layout.

    Is there a way to move / copy pages to a second doc without creating a new layout?

    OR

    Is there a way to MERGE the two layouts into one? All I really need to do at this point is move the 6 pages in Layout 1 to the top of Layout 2, thereby removing Layout 1.

    Thanks in advance,

    Allen

  • July 2, 2021 at 7:10 am #14340793
    Allen Cobb

    Member

    By creating a blank first page at the beginning of doc B, and moving the doc A pages AFTER doc B page 1, I was able to get all the required pages to get inserted at the beginning of doc B. This caused the blank page to become an alternate layout, and so I deleted it.

    But now the whole 275-page document is one lone Custom Layout, which I do not want. I don’t have any use for alternate layouts on this project.

    Is there some way to convert an Alt Layout — there is only this one — into a “non alternate”?

    The behavior of Move Pages, being entangled with Alternate Layouts, seems weird, pointless, inconvenient, and buggy. I can’t make any sense out of it.

    Am I missing something about the proper way to insert pages from one doc into another? It should be a lot simpler than this, but it’s InDesign….

    Allen

  • July 2, 2021 at 8:55 am #14340795
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Hm… is it making an alternate layout, or just a new section? I have not seen the Move Pages feature add a new Alternate Layout, but it can make a new section.

  • July 2, 2021 at 10:24 am #14340810
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    What happens if you go to the Pages panel menu and choose View Pages > Vertically? Does that resolve the issue?

  • July 2, 2021 at 11:17 am #14340814
    Allen Cobb

    Member

    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

  • July 2, 2021 at 12:57 pm #14340818
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Does it do this for ANY document you try to move the pages into? Even a brand new doc?

  • July 2, 2021 at 2:03 pm #14340831
    Allen Cobb

    Member

    Yes. I just made a new doc A and B with greek text and colored B in red. Each doc has 6 pages.

    Then I highlighted the first 3 pages in A and used Layout | Pages | Move pages… and specified BEFORE page 1 in doc B.

    Here’s the result: Note that page numbering is correct, but a layout was created.

    

    Pretty weird.

    Allen

  • July 2, 2021 at 2:06 pm #14340832
    Allen Cobb

    Member

    It looks like the tag isn’t working for me.

    Here’s the URL for the screencap: https://acobb.com/temp/ID-movePages.png

    (Forum Wishlist – allow image uploads!)

    Allen

  • July 2, 2021 at 4:38 pm #14340848
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Yeah, I know what you mean about uploading images… that would be helpful. I’ll have to see if we can find a way to do that in the future. But I see your img tag working fine in the post above, so I think it did actually work.

    In the meantime: I found something interesting… I think this may be happening because you are selecting the first page of the document, and the first page is a section start (the first page is always a section start… you can see that by the triangle on top of the page in the Pages panel).

    If you add 1 page at the start of your red document, and then select pages 2-4 and move them… well, when I try that, it doesn’t create a new section, or a new alternate layout.

    What’s really weird about what you’ve discovered is that the new alternate layout has the same name as the first one! There’s definitely some bug there.

  • July 3, 2021 at 6:16 am #14340851
    Allen Cobb

    Member

    Thanks for the reply, David. I’m still seeing an image icon and no image on my post before last, but the link in my last post does get to the image file on my server.

    The bug does seem to be related to the first page. My work-around (described in my reply to Anne-Marie) was just what you mentioned — add a dummy page to doc B, and then move the pages from A to B, and then delete the dummy page.

    WRT to the two alternate layouts with the same name, I’m wondering if the developers used the alt layout mechanism to handle the insertion, and then — at least in this scenario — failed to merge the two layouts into one. Since the pagination comes out correct, I suspect this may just be an operation that never completed.

    What I had not tried, and you apparently did, was moving pages from doc A that didn’t include page 1 (or a section start). I should try that, but I’m feeling pressure to get on with the project! (It’s a 280 page cookbook “designed” by someone who has zero training in book design, so there are dozens of special case styles and a bazillion fonts, on crowded pages where every point of leading is deemed critical. Quite a workout, and an exercise in diplomacy!)

    Allen

  • July 19, 2021 at 6:07 am #14343315
    paulchinky paulchinky

    Participant

    Thanks for your helpful and always speedy responses! If you get a chance to test, I’m waiting with bait on my breath.

    • July 19, 2021 at 6:40 am #14343317
      Anne-Marie Concepcion

      Member

      Hi Paul, I finally had a chance to sit down and test it out, and the problem isn’t happening for me.

      Are you using the Move Pages command from the source doc’s Pages panel menu? That’s what you should be doing to insert pages from one layout into another. Just make sure that the dialog’s option “Delete Pages After Moving” is NOT checked. That turns the Move Pages command into a Copy Pages command.

      When you click OK, the the pages are copied over to the source doc. Here’s how mine looked:

      https://www.dropbox.com/s/53r1b80wc7auv8g/move%202.png?dl=0

      I moved all 6 pages from my source doc (black text) to AFTER page 1 in my target doc (red text).

      Here’s how the target (red text) layout looked after I moved all the pages from the black text to BEFORE page 1 of the red text:

      https://www.dropbox.com/s/1m2wboa6dn9f7zh/move%203.png?dl=0

      Note that the first page of the page/s from the source doc you’re copying over is always a section start. If you don’t want that, after it appears in the target doc you can right-click on that page in the Pages panel, choose Numbering and Section options, and uncheck the “Start Section” checkbox.

      I cannot make it appear as an Alternate Layout if both target and source docs are showing pages Vertically or Horizontally before I begin the Move operation. Perhaps one of your layouts was showing Pages by Alternate Layout before you did the Move operation? I set my workspace to Advanced and then chose Reset Advanced to “clear the decks” and keep the Pages panel in its default, view Vertically state.

      But if *after* I move the pages, if I choose View by Alternate Layout in the target doc, an Alternate Layout is shown for each section.

  • July 19, 2021 at 9:06 am #14343427
    Allen Cobb

    Member

    @Anne-Marie – Is it normal for sections to show up as separate Alternate Layouts (in the same document)? I’ve never noticed this before, but I don’t often use Alternate Layouts.

    Allen

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