Adobe InDesign: Automatic Page Numbers
Adobe InDesign is a powerful program with a lot of great features, including automatic page numbers. With this feature, you can design your document however you want, and as you move around pages your page numbers will update without you having to do anything at all.
I’m using a template with facing pages for this tutorial, but it works with both facing pages and non-facing pages. However, facing pages does contain some extra steps.
First, we’re going to be working primarily in the Pages panel. To open it up, just go ‘Window’ and then ‘Pages’.
You should have a little ‘A’ in the corner of your page. This means that the A parent has been applied.
If there is no ‘A’ at the top of your screen, just drag the A-Parent page over your page to add it.
A Parent page is like a template for the pages it is applied to. Everything that appears on the parent page will show up like locked content on your page. You can add more items to the page and customise it, but the parent page allows you to save time by templating out things.
To have the page numbers show up automatically on every page, we’re going to add them to our page. Just double click the A-Parent (on the white part, not the word) to edit the parent page.
You’ll know that you’re editing the parent page because at the bottom-left of your screen it will say ‘A-Parent’. If you’re using an older version of Adobe InDesign it will say ‘A-Master’.
Then, we’re going to create a text box. You can either use the shortcut ‘T’ on your computer, or you can find the ‘T’ icon on the left of your screen in the tools panel.
Once you have created your text box, we’re going to go ‘Type’, ‘Insert Special Character’, ‘Markers’, and then ‘Current Page Number’.
When that’s done, your text box will contain a little ‘A’. This is because we’re in the A-Parent, but once you return to your actual page it will say that current page number.
To style it, you can use the Properties panel, or you could use the Character and Paragraph panels. I’ll be using the Properties panel. To bring it up, just go ‘Window’, and then ‘Properties’.
I styled my text box by making it right-aligned, and increasing the font size. Now, I’m going to return to my page and make sure it’s all correct.
And it is! But this is the first page, which isn’t a spread. Let’s see how it looks when I add more pages.
Because I only styled the number on one side, the even pages don’t have a page number, so I need to go back and add that in.
To duplcate the text box, you can either click and drag it while holding ‘Alt’ (or ‘Opt’ on Mac), or you can simply copy and paste (Ctrl+C/Cmd+C and Ctrl+V/Cmd+V).
Then, I used the Properties panel again to left-align the page number for the even pages.
And now when I return to my pages, it looks like this. When you add more pages to your document, the numbers will be automatically generated. If you move pages around, the numbers will automatically update.
