Adding cascading borders?

Question

I need to add cascading borders on pages, so people can kind of find the chapter with the book closed. I don't know the right terminology for it, sorry, but how do I do that? A particular issue is that the borders will also contain text, and some text is pretty long, so they might need to cascade kind of overlapping a bit so the longer text fits as well, but when the book is closed you'll see like a "staircase" effect

Robert at ID-Tasker · Accepted Answer

If they are meant to move down the page to provide chapter or section selectors, the above would still be true: either a script of some kind, component chapters with the markers on the Parent pages, or a single file with either manually placed/copied markers, or a series of Parent pages applied.

By @James Gifford—NitroPress

Yes, perfectly scriptable - even in a vanilla JavaScript.

James Gifford—NitroPress · Answer

One term is thumb tabs, but those are usually distinct, separated elements; when the borders are more or less contiguous along the edge all through the book, it's... no specific term I know of. 🙂 But I know what you mean. It's typical in textbooks, for example.

I assume this is for print, as it wouldn't be of much use in a digital book. The basic technique is to lay a graphic along the outer page edge that extends in as far as you like, for design esthetics, and then out to the bleed margin. There are probably scripts, or ways to script the layout so that it's more or less automatic, but managing the 'cascade' of colors manually should not be an overwhelming task.

If you don't simply go through the book pages and apply the correct cascade graphic/s through cut and paste-paste-paste, you could manage it by using separate Parent pages for each chapter, each with a segment or alignment of the cascade in it. That would work automatically if you keep the chapters as separate INDD files and pull them together in a Book; if all the content is in one file, you'd again have to apply and then 'touch up' the Parent page assignments through the pages.

One caveat is that the on-demand print services often get very fussy about these things. Most don't mind a colored bleed, if you've selected the right print options, but some do not allow any kind of text outside the 'safe text' margin. I just had a project with simple thumb tabs that KDP absolutely refused to print as long as any trace of text was outside the safe line, which was basically the outside text margin. Even graphical 'text' was rejected. I finally went to completely blank tabs, which were not nearly as useful. If you're working with a printer or publisher that has an actual human you can reach, they can approve (or advise on) the specifics of the layout.

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