How to preserve original page labels when deleting pages?

Question

I need to generate a copy of a PDF containing only a subset of pages that have been revised. The page labels are set up in InDesign to generate according to a specific format. The front matter section includes pages 10-1 through 10-6. The next section includes pages 10A-1 through 10A-2. After that is 10B-1 through 10B-38, etc.

How do I delete the unneeded pages or extract the needed pages while retaining their original page labels? Currently, when I delete pages 10B-1 and 10B-2, page 10B-3 automatically renumbers to 10B-1. How do I stop it from doing this? Is there any way to convert the "live" page labeling to become "static?"

I would simply export the subset of pages I need from InDesign. However, they span multiple INDDs in my book file and as far as I can tell there is no way to export a subset of pages that span multiple documents in book.

try67 · Answer

No, you can't really do that. The page labels are created using a pattern, which has a prefix and a dynamic part. So in your case "10B-" is the prefix and the "1", "2", etc. is the dynamic part. This pattern is still in tact when you delete a page, so the dynamic part of the other pages is kept. What you can do, though, is apply a new pattern after you delete the page(s), starting from the page after those you removed, and changing the dynamic part to start from a new number. So if you delete 10B-3, go to the new 10B-3 page (the former 10B-4), and re-apply the page labels from it, using 10B- as the static part and 4 as the initial number of the dynamic part.

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