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I'm new to Indesign, and I'm trying to set up page structures for a ~40-page PDF that's outlning different store layouts. Each store will have 3 different categories of page, each with their own unique page structure/layout: one to outline the floor plan, one to outline the store fixtures, and one to show a grid of images. For example, all the floor plan pages will have a title, a subtitle, a legend, and a floor plan, but their content will obviously change from store-to-store.
I've learned that Master Pages are useful for content that I want to appear on every page, but not useful for content that I want to change from page-to-page. For example, while I want the page's title in the same place on every single page, that's not something I'd want to include in the Master Page because I'd have to override it to change the title content for every single page anyway. Later on, if I decided I want my tites in a different position on the page, I'd have to go back and manually change each page's title again.
With Adobe Xd, you can create objects called Components. Components allow you to create standard content structures where you can change the specific content between Component instances, all while keeping their structure and formatting linked to the Main Component. This functionality is exaclty what I'm looking for in Indesign. It would allow me to set up standard page structures and edit their content, while leaving the ability for me to rearrange the page structures in the future and have that change automatically reflected on all pages.
This seems like a feature any publication designer would want, so I'm assuming an Indesign version of it has to exist, and I'm just too inexperienced to know what I'm looking for. Any help would be much appreciated!
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This is, in fact, a job for parent pages. You can draw empty template frames on the parent pages, and then place the content into those frames on the body pages. If you need to move the titles, for example, you move the title frame on the parent pages and the body pages update. Of course, you will need a parent page/spread for each layout, but if they are similar, you can link them so that changing the top level will change the child levels.
~Barb
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Thanks Barb, this helps a lot! I noticed the .txt documents you dragged in were automatically formatted somehow. Is there any way to apply Paragraph Styles to the text template frames? I've tried applying Paragraph Styles to the text template frames, but the imported text just inherits the default Paragraph Style.
It would also be nice to be able to just directly type into these frames on the Child pages and not have to prepare .txt files to drop in. Is that possible?
Thanks!
 
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Hi @liamdmcl2:
I was using files from my InDesign class – and they happen to be.txt files that were pre-formatted. In real life I never deal with.txt files. Like most of us, I normally work with Word files. You can pre-assign styles in Microsoft Word and then map them to the equivalent InDesign style on the way in, and that's how I work with my regular clients.
Here's some more information on that feature:
https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/paragraph-character-styles.html
If you have a question on style mapping of course please ask us, but go ahead and start a new thread since it's not related to the original question.
And yes, you can type directly into the child frames, but you have to override them first: Ctrl+Sh click with the Selection tool (Cmd+Sh click on Mac).
~Barb