David, thanks for the example and I will run through both yours and Peter’s method as all knowledge is good. Once all the editing was accomplished and the document was approved as final, I then inserted a duplicate page and set the printer for letter size paper doubled sided and mission accomplished. This placed the two half pages facing each other. I finally came up with a Master B with a two page spread and then applied that to the original document. Well it seems InDesign was not designed to do that. The challenge was to get the half page to print two sided in a 2-up format on the printer. The goal was to print the document two sided on 8 1/2 paper then cut the letter size in half on the long side ending up with two sided Half Page Letter size document. My original problem: I had a user (staff member with limited knowledge of InDesign) create a half page document consisting of two pages. I created a Master B which was the two page spread that I wanted then applied it to the original document. I was under the gun to get this working so I ventured off into Master Pages. Of course, it’s pretty rare that you’d need to do this, but when you need it… well, now you know how! When you do that, InDesign asks which page size do you want to keep? The answer, of course, is “Use master page size”: Note that in the image above, the auto page number (which I placed there just for demo purposes) has updated to page 2.įinally, apply the new master page to your new multi-page spread. Now use the Add Pages feature (also in the Pages panel menu) to add one page before and one page after the page in your document: Next, make sure these two features are turned off in the Pages panel menu: Allow Spread to Shuffle and Allow Document to Shuffle. Here’s the Pages panel after creating the new spread: In this case (below) I’m creating a 3-page spread with the width set to one-third the width of the original page width (remember that you can do math in the fields… in this case, division): First, create a new master page which is defined as a multi-page spread.

The second method actually leaves you with three individual pages with editable objects. If you want to edit it, you can Option/Alt-double-click on the graphic with the Selection tool to invoke “Edit Original” (which opens the placed InDesign file back in InDesign, of course!) The Master Page Method And, of course, the objects on that page are static and not editable. Notice there’s a problem here… the ‘automatic page number’ isn’t updating… it’s fixed at page 1, even though it’s technically the third page. Now, use File > Place to import the INDD file three times-once for each page. In this dialog box, set the Align From icon to either align left, center, or align right.įor example, in the following image, I’m changing the frame fitting options for the frame on page 3, which will force the placed document to be “align right”: On each page, add a graphic frame, and for each frame, choose Object > Fitting > Frame Fitting Options. So, in this case you’d create a new 3-page document one-third the width of the original, and put a graphic frame on each page. Remember that you can place one InDesign document (.indd file) into another, and it acts much like placing a graphic. The easiest way to “split up” a document into pieces is to place it into a new document that is the size you want. (Well, perhaps more than two, but I’ll describe two here.) The Document-in-Document Method There are two ways to split this document. In the image above, the “1” in each text frame is an automatic page number-obviously it’s all just page one. Let’s take an example of a trifold that was created on a single page, and now you want it on three pages: So you’ve laid out an InDesign document on a single page, and now you want to split it into individual pages… Possible? Sure!

Page shuffle indesign