Inspiring

Question

How to create foldout pages with proper numbering?

Forum|Forum|5 days ago
April 25, 2026
3 replies
66 views

Dear all,

in my daily printed music production job it happens (albeit rarely) to need to create foldout pages when the music has not enough rests to allow for a comfortable page turn.

To give you some context, let’s imagine that I have page 4 on the left and page 5 on the right. If I need a foldout page on the left I will need to number it 4-bis, while a foldout to the right will need to be numbered 5-bis.

The next spread will continue to pages 6-7 as if nothing happened. The printer will then know what to do.

How do I best achieve this in InDesign? I have seen something in the Pages panel about allowing Spreads and Pages to shuffle but I am not 100% sure I have understood how that works in practice. Also, how to manage proper page numbering?

Thanks!

rob day

Community Expert

Also, what is the “Allow Document Pages to Shuffle” option for?

The Allow Document Pages to Shuffle and Allow Selected Spreads to Shuffle are page not document level preferences—each spread can be set differently (which is necessary for creating gatefolds).

If I select the 4-5 spread in the Pages panel and uncheck the Allow… preferences, the page numbers are in brackets indicating the setting for that spread.

If I select all of the document pages, note the hyphen in front of –Allow Selected Spreads to Shuffle indicating the mixed Allow settings for the selected pages:

To add a 3rd page to a spread watch the icon when you drag and drop a page.

This will attach a page to the 4-5 spread creating a gatefold:

This will ad the page to a new spread below the 4-5 spread:

I

InélsòreAuthor

Inspiring

This is not my experience.

I tried in a new empty document:

added 20 pages
selected spread 2-3
right-click > unchecked just “allow spread”
dragged page 4 next to page 3
RESULT: page 5 remained alone in its spread

Thinking that I needed to also uncheck “allow pages” I hit Cmd-Z until I went back to the beginning and tried again:

selected spread 2-3
right-click > unchecked “allow spread” and “allow document pages” to shuffle
dragged page 4 next to page 3
RESULT: page 5 remained alone in its spread

What am I missing to make sure that, if I drag a page to a previous spread, the following spreads just remain 2-page spreads as I believe they should?

rob day

Community Expert

There are multiple ways to do this. Try starting with an 18 page doc, and drag a master next to page 5

Then another next to page 2

Now there are 20 pages with 2 gatefolds:

I

InélsòreAuthor

Inspiring

Dear Rob,

thank you so much for explaining this and for attaching a project.

So, if I understood correctly, unchecking “allow selected spreads to shuffle” prevents InDesign from having that spread follow the usual 1 - 2|3 - 4|5 etc. structure.

One thing I noticed is that, doing that, when attaching page 4 to the right of page 3 to form a right gatefold, the spread containing pages 5-6 broke and because a single-page spread. The only way I could make any progress would be to keep unchecking ASSTS and manually edit the entire document up to the last page (ca. 20 pages). Perhaps I am dreaming, but I would have expected the next spread after the edited one to resume behaving as it did previously, unless InDesign cannot allow—without unchecking that option—to have an odd-numbered page to the left and an even-numbered page to the right. Or is there another reason?

Also, what is the “Allow Document Pages to Shuffle” option for? I found through experimentation—but not understanding why—that if I kept that checked I would not be able to organise the spread following a gatefold one correctly. Perhaps it is normal that, once you “break” a document like that, you need to go that way throughout the document. If so, it is a pity because sometimes I just need one or two gatefold in 40+ pages.

For numbering I can certainly invent something manual, but perhaps I can apply a custom page template to the gatefolds so that the page number has the format “previous page number”-bis.

Please let me know if any of my assumptions are wrong or if there are ways around those.

Thank you once again.

rob day

Community Expert

I have seen something in the Pages panel about allowing Spreads and Pages to shuffle but I am not 100% sure I have understood how that works in practice.

Hi @Inélsòre , You can uncheck Allow Selected Spreads to Shuffle in order to “glue” gatefold spread pages together. So here I’ve setup a double gatefold (8 total pages)

You can also use Numbering and Section Options to control section page numbering. In this example the open double gatefold has no page numbers (see attached example)