Creating and applying parent pages

Now we're ready to start creating the parent pages for the Midwest Pet Pals Gazette newsletter. As mentioned previously, we'll be creating three parent pages: one for the front page, and two for the inside pages. The front page will contain the nameplate for the newsletter, and the inside pages will have headers across the tops of the pages and page numbers in the outside bottom corners.

If we look at the top of the Pages panel for Pet Pals Gazette.indd, we'll see two items: a parent page labeled [None], and a two-page spread labeled A-Parent. InDesign created these for us when we first created the document. There isn't currently any content on these pages — we'll turn these pages into the inside parent pages later on in this section. For now, let's go ahead and create a new parent page that will hold the content we want to include on the newsletter's front page.

Creating a new parent page

Creating a new parent page is done through the New Parent dialog box, which is shown below:

In the New Parent dialog box, we can assign a prefix and a name to a new parent page, as well as indicate whether or not the page should be based on an existing parent page. We can also indicate how many pages the parent should have, as well as the page size and page orientation (if it's different from the default page size we chose when creating the document).

Let's go ahead and create the front cover parent page. We'll do this using the Pages panel menu.

The new parent page is created, and while it may not look like anything changes on the screen, InDesign displays the new blank parent page in the document window.

We now have a parent page for the cover of the newsletter, in addition to the parent pages InDesign created when making the new document. However, both of these parents have the same prefix, which will cause confusion if left like this. If we keep the same prefix for both parent pages, it'll be hard to tell which parent is applied to a document page by looking at its thumbnail in the Pages panel. We can fix this by changing the prefix in the options for A-Parent.

Changing the options for a parent page

If desired, we can change the name, prefix, and amount of pages for any parent we've created in a document — this is how we'll fix the problem of having two pages with the same prefix. While we're editing the options for A-Parent, we'll also change the name of A-Parent to Inside so we can use this parent for the inside pages of the newsletter.

Applying a parent page to a document page

Now that we've changed the options for A-Parent, let's look at the Pages panel again - specifically, let's look at the prefix displayed on the document pages:

Currently, both document pages are using the B-Inside parent page. Since that set of parent pages was automatically created by InDesign when we first made the document, it automatically applied that parent to all pages in the document – and when we changed the prefix for that parent to B, that updated the prefix wherever it's displayed in InDesign. Since we have a separate parent page for the front page of the newsletter, we'll apply the A-Cover parent to the first page of the document.

There are a number of different ways to apply a parent page to a document page - the quickest method of doing this, especially if we're working with a single page, is to press and drag the parent page onto the document page we want to apply it to. Let's try this out now.

The prefix displayed on page 1 should now be A instead of B.

Before moving on, let's reorder the parent pages in the top half of the Pages panel so they're in alphabetical order by prefix. We can reorder pages by pressing and dragging a page to a new location in the pages panel. After we're done reordering the pages, we'll collapse the Pages panel to make more room on the screen (if necessary) and save the file.