Page Shuffle in Adobe InDesign

Thanks to Jeff Witchel & Layers Magazine for this tip.  In my InDesign projects I had always been annoyed by not knowing how to insert pages without screwing up my entire layout, especially where I had very large graphic elements on the pages.  Here’s a feature I wish I knew about back then:

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Adobe InDesign CS3 Tip – Why Would You Want to Allow Pages to Shuffle?

One of the choices under the Pages panel Options menu that is checked by default is “Allow Pages to Shuffle.” Years ago, when I first started using InDesign, my first reaction to this choice was, “What is shuffling and why would I want my pages to do it?” As I began to play with the feature, I quickly realized what this interesting choice of words was all about. If pages are allowed to shuffle and a single page is added before a particular spread, all pages “shuffle” forward in the rest of the document so that the even numbered pages become odd numbered pages to the right, and the odd numbered pages move down to become the even numbered left-hand side of the next spread. So “shuffling” maintains order in spread pagination. But what happens if this default is unchecked? You can create spreads with more than two pages (a gatefold spread in a magazine for example). So, if you need to make your spreads wider than two pages, simply “unshuffle” your document’s pages.

Tip provided by Jeff Witchel, Adobe® Certified Training Provider.

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