Running Chapter Heads not working

[saxtonstudio]

I'm a little embarrased. I've done this before and can't remember how, so have been reading and googling and you-tubing and am hoping someone here can just tell me what to do!

Goal: Running chapter heads in a book, on right hand page, need to automatically change to new echapter title when beginning a new section.

I've tried it from the numbering and section options, as well as creating a text variable. The variable seemed like it might work but it's using the first title in the document for all the chapters instead of pulling from an individual section's title. (So now all the running headers say "preface"!)

Thank you in advance.

Don't know if screenshots help, but this is where I've been trying to make it work.

[Manan Joshi]

Hi @saxtonstudio,

Can you cross check that the style on which the running header is based is applied properly on the pages giving you troubles? Also it would be nice if you could share a sample document so that we can test it as well, also describe specific use case on what result do you expect w.r.t the pages in the document.

-Manan

[saxtonstudio]

Okay... I checked the style, and it was (I'm ashamed to say) incorrect, BUT when I use the correct one I get nothing at all. Super confused. In any event, do you mean for me to attach the whole InDesign doc? I know you don't need 300 pages of stuff, so I can go in and delete all but a few chapters if that would help. Let me know and I'll get it right over.

[Manan Joshi]

So we made a little progress though we did not get the results. Yes a small sample with as less pages as possible to demonstrate the issue would be fine

-Manan

[saxtonstudio]

Here you go! I didn't remove the front matter because it would mess up the text flow... so you'll see the issue starts at spread 12-13, and I included three chapters. THANK YOU.

I'm sure its some simple thing I'm forgetting! (I looked at the last book I did, where it doesn't look like I created a text variable, and it seemed to have worked through the Pages number and section options...but I couldn't recreate that here.)

[Willi Adelberger]

You did define your running header based on running header and that is not correct.

You should base it on chapter title.

[saxtonstudio]

Will, that's what I'd done the first time, and it shows "preface" as the title. I changed it back to that so you can see (attached).

[Manan Joshi · Accepted solution]

Two things, one was mentioned by @Willi Adelberger that it seems your header should be based on Chapter title style. However, even with this, the value of the header is "Preface" across the document. The reason this is so is that all the other chapter titles are placed in a seperate frame which is not threaded to the main document threaded frame. This thing is discussed in the following thread

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/running-header-refers-to-previous-chapter/m-p/11...

So the solution for you would be to accomodate the chapter titles in the threaded frame itself

-Manan

[saxtonstudio]

Ahhhhh! Thank you. Let me give that a go!  /   OK, I got it to work. Just had to redo my layout approach to thread the title in. THANK YOU!