Switching from Facing Pages to One Page Design

Of course I use parent pages (or a parent spread). One page is for the left-hand page, the other for the right-hand page, because the margins and guides are different.

As far as my logic goes, when I switch to Facing Pages, the left-hand parent page should remain exactly as it is. But no. What does Adobe do? It simply deletes the second page and applies the change across all pages.

Whether I’m switching from spreads to facing pages or vice versa is beside the point. The reason why I’m doing it is irrelevant. The issue is that when I switch from one setup to another, the existing information should be preserved, not arbitrarily deleted.

I had to recreate everything manually from scratch. For me, that’s completely unacceptable. I’m getting upset about this not because it’s just this one issue. No. It’s the accumulation of dozens of things, both in InDesign and Illustrator, that are so poorly handled that this is simply the point where my frustration boils over. 

Adobe charges premium, luxury-level prices, but the experience often feels anything but premium.

Hi Aleks,

To convert a facing page document to single pages, do 2 things:

1. File > Document Setup … and turn off Facing Pages
2. Go to each of your Parent Pages (in case you have more than 1), right-click the Parent Page and choose “Parent Options for “YourParentName”. In the resulting Parent Options dialog box, set the Number of Pages from 2 down to 1 (implying changing from a spread of 2 to a single page). Click OK. 

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/desktop/create-and-organize-pages/create-and-manage-parent-pages/edit-parent-page-layout.html

Makes pefect sense if you had the left and right parent pages set up differently. The real question I have is why you felt you needed to do this. The document can still be output using single pages without changing it.

Further, if you had properly used those parent pages, everything should adapt to the change. I, for one, would need to see the file to know what you’re seeing and what happened.

Prior to switching from facing pages to single pages had you been using Parent (Master) pages to globally control your margins and overall structure? If that had been done then all of the now single pages would retain the left hand Parent pages. You could then apply the right hand master globally to the appropriate pages using “Apply Parent to Page:” found under the Pages Panel pull-down menu. Controlling a large document with Parent pages can help to avoid catastrophes such as you describe. Using Parent pages would also allow you to globally fix any other issues which may have arisen with the conversion to single pages.