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henningtrollback
Participant
November 3, 2025
Question

The master text pages and auto flow issues

  • November 3, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 103 views

Hello, I have a problem with my master text pages. Or with auto flow.

 

I am a pretty experienced indesign user, I know how to make a really sweet book cover, knows my way around type and kerning and all that. But I am pretty new to working with really long documents. And I start to feel like I really don't understand wth I am doing wrong, and I really hate that.

 

So I am working with this 300 page book, footnotes, ca 25 images and some nifty design details that I'm happy with. But right now it is so slow! It takes forever to recalculate auto-flow of text if I just do any little change that will impact auto-flow. 

 

After my last mental breakdown last week I figured out how to use "master text pages." Or at least I think so. But there's something weird with it.

I notice this thing in the Pages window, but I don't get what it means. Some pages have a faint dotted line around the text boxes, and some don't. It must mean something. Have I done something wrong when I placed the text into the master text pages? Is that why it is slow? Could someone please help out and explain what the dotted lines mean? (Do I have to create a "book" file for a document this size?)

1 reply

Barb Binder
Community Expert
Barb BinderCommunity Expert
Community Expert
November 3, 2025

Hi @henningtrollback:

 

Dotted lines indicate frames on a parent page, solid lines indicate frames on a body page. Text frames snapped to the margin/column guides go underneath and are very hard to see on the page, but visible in the Pages panel.

 

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
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    henningtrollbackAuthor
    Participant
    November 6, 2025

    Hello Barb! Thank you for your answer. I realised, after all, that I hadn't understood it fully, just after posting this question. I managed to learn that I hadn't activated primary text frames. After doing that it all works better. And then I separated my chapters to different files and created a book-file. So it is pretty managable now. Thanks again for answering!

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