Numbering PAGES in a book

[KenIsaacson]

Question about numbering pages in a book.

Some of the chapters (documents) in my book start on a left-page. I see that the way to get the document to start on that left-page is to change the document page numbering to start at "2" (or some other even number).

When I incorporate such a document into my book, the number on the first page of each such document stays at "2," even after updating numbers, and even though in the book menu I've selected "Continue from previous document" in "Book Page Numbering Options."

The only way I've found to cure this is to open each such document from the book, go into number options while there, and change the option back to "auto." If I've added a number of chapters, it becomes a repetitive necessity.

Am I overlooking a simple way?

Many thanks!

Ken

[Randy Hagan · Accepted solution]

My suspicion is that you'll find that when you open your InDesign documents and open the Layout>Section and Numbering Options... menu command that it's set with the Start Section check box selected and the Start Page Numbering at: radio button selected and the number in the corresponding edit box is 2. This would be the automatic setting when you start the page numbering with anything but 1 when you create the InDesign file in the New Document dialog box.

That may or may not work for the first document in the book, but it'll never work for the following ones.

The fix is to open each document individually, open the Layout>Section and Numbering Options... menu command and change to the Automatic Page Numbering radio button. Then select the OK button, save the file and close it.

This is a tedious process, but you should only have to do it once for each InDesign document. After that, when you update page numbering through the Book panel, the page numbering should update correctly.

[KenIsaacson]

Got it. Thanks.