Skip to main content
Inspiring
June 4, 2026
Question

Why does InDesign randomly refuse to add new pages at the end of a doc?

  • June 4, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 41 views

I’m building a doc page by page. When I need to add another page, I find that InDesign will randomly add it to the end of the document or insert it in between the last and next-to-last pages… even though no page is selected in the Pages panel.

 

When InDesign decides to insert rather than append a page, I can almost always Undo and then repeat the operation… and it’ll be appended as expected.

 

But right now, InDesign refuses to append a page to the end of the document.

 

 

    2 replies

    Peter Kahrel
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    June 4, 2026

    Do you have Smart Text Flow enabled? If you do and you disable it, does the problem go away?

    To add a page at the end of the document I always use this one-liner (assigned to a keyboard shortcut):

    app.documents[0].pages.add (LocationOptions.AT_END);

     

    Inspiring
    June 4, 2026

    Thanks for that. Smart Text Flow is disabled.

    Community Expert
    June 4, 2026

    Does this happen only for a particular document or all documents in general? If it is one document then this could be due to some corruption. Export to IDML and then save back as INDD. Also, clear out InDesign preferences that could also help

    -Manan
    Inspiring
    June 4, 2026

    Thanks for the reply. It happens randomly with all documents. Later, this same document behaved as expected. Thus far there’s no evident pattern.