Help needed with running heads

[lorraineKP]

I'm sorry to ask such newbie type questions but I'm having a hard time finding the answers and unfortunately I don't have a long time to fix this.

I am trying to typeset a book that has the book title on the left running head, and the changing chapter titles on the right running head. The designer has kindly gotten the styles set up, but some of the chapter titles are super-long. I cannot figure out how to edit them. I can't click in the box holding the running head text.

Say for example I wanted to delete the part of the chapter title after the colon. How would I do it? The whole thing of it is running off the edge of the page and messing up the numbers.

If anyone would help me I'd appreciate it so much.

Thanks.

 

[Ian Blogs · Accepted solution]

Go to the master page and edit there. If you want to edit a normal page click on the title holding down shift/ctrl

[lorraineKP]

On my Mac it ended up being shift/command, but it's only letting me highlight the ENTIRE super-long title.

[lorraineKP]

Thank you, by the way. I didn't think of trying keyboard combos to get in there, which makes sense. thanks.

[SJRiegel · Accepted solution]

Running Heads are treated by InDesign as a single character, so they cannot be edited in the way you are describing. The only solutions would be to 1) Manually re-enter the text you want for the over-long headers, 2) add another box with the correct text and style on the reference page, just off the top of the page, and touching it, and create a different style for the over-long title. or 3) Separate the reference headers into carefully positoned separate text boxes beside each other, and apply a different paragraph style to the colon and text that follows it.

[lorraineKP]

Thank you! For #1, I would have been glad to do that because it's only a handful of pages that have the over-long titles, but I can't figure out how to manually edit those running heads because I can't click in there. When I tried shift-command on Mac, it hightlights the whole long title and I can't slice off part of it.

Ultimately I will do #2 or #3 but I wish I understood how to just go in there and edit.

[Barb Binder · Accepted solution]

Hi @lorraineKP:

This happens in my documentation, as well. Instead of defining the Running Header variable to call in a paragraph style, I have it set up to call in a character style. Then I can decide which words appear in the running head.

~Barb 

[lorraineKP]

Thank you!