If your INDD image is 350×250 px and you exported at 72ppi, the image is exactly the same size as a 350×250 image created in Photoshop. It just looks different in Id because of the different ways that the two programs interpret “100%”.

To InDesign, 1 px = 1 pt. It uses your screen resolution setting in the OS to display the image at what ought to be 100% of its printed size. (InDesign is at heart a print layout program.) In Photoshop, 100% means “pixel for pixel”, which is not the same thing.

You can verify this easily enough. Create a 350×250 in Photoshop, and compare it at 100% to your Id-created image in Photoshop.

I routinely (and for the same reasons) create web and digital billboard/digital display images in InDesign and have never had an issue.

You can squeeze a bit more quality out of Id, especially for text, if you export at a multiple of 72 ppi, like 144 or 288 ppi, bringing that into Photoshop and scaling and compressing at the same time in Save for Web. Starting big and scaling down in Photoshop preserves hard edges better than exporting at 72 ppi from Id.

It’s a cakewalk to set up a simple Action in Photoshop to automate this process. For extra credit, turn it into a droplet (or use Tools > Photoshop > Batch if you’ve lots of them to process at once).

Other than a custom script, there isn’t really a faster way to do this (although you could bring them into an A4 document, set Liquid Layout to “Scale” and then change the size of the document to A5). Once the PDF has been created, Acrobat sees the spreads as single pages, so there’s not a neat, automated way to break them apart.

One suggestion would be to inform clients that there is a file preparation charge of X per page for documents not supplied as single pages. This tends to get their attention more effectively than simply saying “Please submit PDFs as single-page, not spreads.”

David will remember better than I do, but from what I recall CS2 did not have functioning cross-references, so it’s going to be either a custom script (perhaps Tomaxxi or Jongware will jump in here) or it will be a matter of updating by hand. Not the news you wanted to hear, unfortunately.

You’re welcome! Glad to help. :)

You can’t get there using a master page and what’s baked into InDesign.

A custom numbered list, however, started on a regular page, can be extended using “Duplicate Spread” from the context menu in the Pages panel. In the list options, be sure that you select “Continue numbering across stories” is checked. The frame you place on your “pseudo-master” can contain any kind of non-printing character, such as a thin space or hair space. All the list function needs is some kind of content, at which point it obediently provides a number.

As the document is being edited, if the order in which these created pages changes relative to one another, the numbers in the frames will change so that they remain consecutive in the document.