It's starting to come back to me now. You'll recall I said this had been discussed recently?

It turns out that it only works if you override the master frame onto the live document page. You can put it onto the master for convenience, but you'll have to go through and override all the pages to make it work.

It might be worth looking for that other thread. It's possible Dave or someone suggested a scripting solution, but I'm afraid I really don't recall. I think there was a reference to an InDesign Secrets article, though, and maybe there was a better technique in the comments.

Peter

Bob Bringhurst posted about this on his blog in June, in Page Numbering on a Single Spread Page. His solution requires a manual override on every page where you'd want to do this (which could be a lot).

I wrote a quick script that does all the overriding for you.

It walks each master spread and finds all the text frames with current (auto)/prev/next page number markers, and then walks all the pages that master spread is applied to and overrides each of those text frames.

Unfortunately it appears that the textFrame.override() method somehow breaks story/text Frame threading (is this a bug?). So the script has to workaround it. I do so with labels, by assigning a label to each master page textFrame that needs to be overriden, and then finding those overriden labels on each document spread and re-establishing the threading that existed between the same labels on the master page.

This script doesn't do anything clever if you have a spread with 1 or 3+ pages, so you'd have to deal with such cases by hand. It also removes any existing labeled overrides before it runs, which I guess might not be desirable in some cases, in which case you could comment out section (3.).

If anyone wants to do this (I'm not sure why…), enjoy:

// John Hawkinson <jhawk@mit.edu>
// 
// For each master spread:
// 1. Find textFrames on the master spreads with threaded next/prev story frame, label them
// 2. Find the set of spreads with the master applied
// 3. Remove existing overrides
// 4. Override the item on all such pages.
// 5. Restablish threading for labeled items on such pages
 
var debug = 0;
 
var d = app.activeDocument;
for (n=0; n<d.masterSpreads.count(); n++) {
     var ms = d.masterSpreads[n];
     if (debug)
       $.writeln("Processing master spread " + ms.name);
     var tfTodo = new Array();
     var labels = 0;
     // 1. Find textFrames on the master spreads with threaded next/prev story frame, label them
     for (m=0; m< ms.textFrames.length; m++) {
          var tf = ms.textFrames[m];
          if (tf.parentStory.textContainers.length > 1)
            for (l=0; l<tf.parentStory.characters.length; l++) {
              if (tf.parentStory.characters[l].contents==SpecialCharacters.AUTO_PAGE_NUMBER ||
              tf.parentStory.characters[l].contents==SpecialCharacters.NEXT_PAGE_NUMBER ||
              tf.parentStory.characters[l].contents==SpecialCharacters.PREVIOUS_PAGE_NUMBER) {
                 tfTodo.push(tf);
                 tf.label="MP"+(++labels);
                 break;
               }
          } // for … tf.parentStory.characters
     } // for … ms.textFrames
 
     // 2. Find the set of spreads with the master applied
     for (m=0; m<d.spreads.length; m++) {
          var ds =d.spreads[m];
          if (ds.pages.length==2 &&  // Don't mess with single-page or 3+ page spreads
              ds.appliedMaster && ds.appliedMaster.id==ms.id) {
            if (debug) 
              $.writeln("  Document spread "+m+" ("+
                 ds.pages.everyItem().name+") has this master");
            
           // 3. Remove existing overrides
            for (l=1; l<=labels; l++) { //  1-indexed
               try { ds.pageItems.itemByName("MP"+l).removeOverride(); }
               catch (e) { if (e!="ReferenceError: Object is invalid") throw(e); }
            }
 
           // 4. Override the item on all such pages.
            for (l=0; l<tfTodo.length; l++)
                 if (tfTodo[l].parent.side == PageSideOptions.LEFT_HAND)
                    tfTodo[l].override(ds.pages[0]);
                 else
                    tfTodo[l].override(ds.pages[1]);
       
            // Unfortunately threading is not preserved by the textFrame.override() method 
            // 5. Restablish threading for labeled items on such pages
            var masterNext;
            for (l=1; l<=labels; l++) //  1-indexed
                    if ((masterNext=ms.pageItems.itemByName("MP"+l).nextTextFrame) != null)
                      ds.pageItems.itemByName("MP"+l).nextTextFrame =
                        ds.pageItems.itemByName(masterNext.label);
       
        } // if … ds.appliedMaster.id
     } // for … d.spreads
} // for … d.masterSpreads
exit;