Adjusting margins and columns in Document Set-up and in Margins and Columns doesn't work…

[Alastair L]

So I have an existing document with multiple pages already laid out. When I adjust the margins using File Menu –>  Document Setup or  Layout Menu –> Margins and Columns… nothing hcanges on most of the pages, except the first page of the dcument which is blank and only there for pagination reasons.

M1 mac Mini, macOS Big Sur 11.6.1

one of a dozen or so bugs making InDesign almost unusable on M1 Mac. Adobe has had pre-production M1 macs for around two years now… this is inexcusable, I literally cannot work and will be forced to buy Serif Designer products if this continues to make my day job hell. 

[Alastair L]

Serif Publisher, Designer and Photo all 30% off ATM and one-time payment for current versions.

You are making me do this Adobe. Maybe you should have thought about that when you offshored development of your core products.

[Alastair L]

Why can't we edit posts any more?!

[Creamer Training]

You may not remember or know that Serif had a series of Windows-only software programs a number of years ago. They stopped development on those programs without any upgrade path to the new Affinity line. So, all companies have, or at least the appearance of, customer service issues.

Regarding your "offshored development" comment: Are you implying that a programmer from another country is less capable than someone from (presumedly) USA? What is your basis for that statement? This implies that these issues would not exist if the programming was done locally, which I doubt.

By the way, Serif is a UK company so, technically, it they wrote the software locally, it is still offshored from a USA viewpoint. I would be surprised if all their programing is not "offshored" from the UK but that is just supposition on my end. 

If anything, Adobe did not have enough beta testers on the new systems and up-to-date OS.

[Randy Hagan]

Do you have the text frames highlighted with your Arrow/Selection tool? And do you only have the first document page selected in your Pages panel?

Once you lay down type within InDesign, unless you've correctly set up for and incoporated Liquid Layout features, the only way you're going to change the margins/columns of your type is to do it manually with your selected text frame(s). If you're trying to do it globally before you lay down type, try selecting your parent/master pages in the Pages panel and change your margins and columns there before you lay down your type.

In short, I don't think your problems are caused by InDesign. Please try the suggested fixes I've offered and see if they help you past your issues.

Hope this helps,

Randy

[Alastair L]

I never got the hang of Liquid layouts and don't use indesign emough to be bother learning it thanks, Randy.

The weird thing was the margins were changing on some pages, some of the time but not on other pages and not all of the time. Like a dozen other bugs I've had over the last few days in InDesign on a new M1 mini. Some of them, like Text Wrapping (runaround) constantly crash InDesign, so I'm just not using those featres and having to "Move Pages" to a new document every hour to avoid the ttack of the bugs.

When I changed the margins on the Master Page just now it fixed the pages that hadn't change. I did try selescting pages in the pages palette and things like that. I know I can do it one frame at a time but that seemed like a slow way to do it in a multipaged document.

[Randy Hagan]

I'm glad that working with your parent pages — that's the new nomenclature for what was formerly called master pages — got you past your issue.

I was fairly sure that was at the root of your problems. Not be cause I'm like Rhodes Scholar-bright. But because, truth be told, I made that mistake myself when I was first working with InDesign. As well as the time I set up my parent pages perfectly, then starting work on my document and realized when I put my work on every page of the document that I forgot to change to my document page and put it on my parent page. A lot of us learn how to use InDesign better by error, then trials to fix them. Or at least I did. I'm glad I could help.

Can I ask a favor of you? Could you please mark the post that helped you as the correct answer? That alerts the moderators to archive it so it can help others who may have similar issues. So we can both help the next person who runs across a similar problem.

And I feel for your other issues with InDesign. I know that Silicon Mac users are having issues with InDesign, and that it's cold comfort, but Adobe developers are working hard to hunt down the bugs and fix them. Not that I can speak for Adobe Systems, but it will get better. I'm confident of that.

Good Luck,

Randy