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Known Participant
February 28, 2026
Question

Is there a way to create a parent page from a regular page?

  • February 28, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 13 views

A search on this question brings up two incorrect suggestions:

  1. Drag the page into the master-page area in the Pages pane; this is not allowed.
  2. Right-click on the page and use a context-menu option to create a parent page from it; there is no such menu item.

Is there a real way to do it?

 

    1 reply

    Dave Creamer of IDEAS
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    February 28, 2026
    1. Yes, it is allowed. 
    2. You are correct, not as a right-click but as a panel menu.

     

    David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)
    Known Participant
    March 1, 2026

    Thanks. As it turns out, I could drag to the parent-page area if I selected both pages in the spread.

    Now I need to make one that is a mirror-image: This one has a big fold-out page on the right; now I need one with the fold-out on the left. I thought I’d say “duplicate spread” (on the child pages, not the parent spread) and then swap the pages around, but “duplicate spread” doesn’t appear to work correctly. It adds pages to the document as displayed in the editing pane, but they are missing from the Pages pane.

    “Duplicate spread at end of document” produces the same behavior.

    Screen grab attached.

    Update: There are a couple of bugs in play here, potentially. Or a bug and a bad design choice. I discovered that there were three copies of the wide-layout pages in the document itself, but only one spread showed in the Pages pane. After deleting the two undisclosed ones, I… don’t remember exactly what I did.

    But at some point I discovered that InDesign decided to put further copies of the wide spread into an “alternate layouts” column in the Pages pane without asking. Yes… because viewing your document’s pages out of order is the logical default, Adobe.

    Anyone, I restored the logical order of the Pages pane by undoing the view option I never selected, and seem to have accomplished what I wanted.

    Dave Creamer of IDEAS
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    March 1, 2026

    It makes sense that one would have to select a spread to add it as a parent page.

    I’m not sure why you think InDesign would flip the foldout automatically. The command is “duplicate spread” which is exactly what it does. All you have to do is move the fold out page, which is usually shorter than the regular page size anyway.

     

    David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)