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

Forum|Forum|24 days ago
June 4, 2026
2 replies
48 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.

Peter Kahrel

Community Expert

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);

T

Thomas_CalvinAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks for that. Smart Text Flow is disabled.

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @Thomas_Calvin,

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. I hope the issue has already been resolved with the suggestions shared by the experts.

If you're still experiencing it, I'd like to gather a few more details to investigate further. Could you please confirm your exact InDesign version (Help > About InDesign) and your operating system version? It would also be helpful if you could test whether the same behavior occurs in a brand-new document created from scratch. I tried testing this with old and new documents but could not reproduce it on version 21.4.1.

If you haven't already, please try manually resetting your InDesign preferences by following the video at the bottom of this article and let us know if that makes any difference:
https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/setting-preferences.html

Also, I noticed in your video that you were already selecting the last page before adding a new one, which is the correct workflow. I just wanted to confirm that this is indeed how you're performing the operation each time the issue occurs.

Looking forward to your update so we can investigate this further.

Abhishek

M

Manan Joshi

Community Expert

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

T

Thomas_CalvinAuthor

Inspiring

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

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