Setting up a default text flow using master pages

[DavidSweeneyBear]

Hi all, I'm trying to set up master pages so my text flows the way I want it in a book I'm planning.

I have two master pages, Master A:

...and master B:

Master B is appied to all pages except 2 + 3, which have master A

Ignoring page 1, page 2 is intended to have a picture placed on it and I want the story to start on page 3:

As you can see I've typed some random text into the frame and allowed it to overflow and hence I get the red triangle

What I would like to happen is for the text to flow on to page 4 (which has master B applied) and then flow on to subsequent pages automatically.

It would seem that the output of Master A needs to be threaded to the input of master B - but I don't know how to do this.

Any ideas?

[rob day · Accepted solution]

Make sure both masters are using Primary text frames. Here I’ve set up the document with all A-Masters, and flowed the text from page 3 to 8. With thetext flow established I can drag the B-Master on to a page in the pages panel and convert that page to the B-Master without interupting the text flow

Dragging the B-Master on to the 4-5 spread

[DavidSweeneyBear]

Thanks for that, it all makes sense in theory. However, changing the frames to primary on all masters didn't quite do the trick for some reason - the text flow on page 3, corresponding to the right hand page of my master A still didn't seem to want to go anywhere.

What did work was this: I manually threaded page 3's text frame to left hand text frame page 4, then left hand frame to right hand frame on page 5, finally right hand frame page 5 to left hand frame page 6

Then i dragged pages 2 & 3 and 4 & 5 into the masters section, creating C and D masters.

I now have masters that i can apply to my document and the text flow works.

[Steve Werner]

Rob is correct. Here's an article which explains more about Primary text frames:

InDesign Basics: Primary Text Frames - InDesignSecrets.com ...