I’ve been in this business nearly 20 years, and for all the time I spent in XPress, I was only aware of the Auto Page Number feature. I had no idea XPress had next/previous page characters.

So it’s not all that surprising to me that so few people are aware of or using these features. I’m still learning myself.

I know QuarkXPress had this feature since version immemorial and in fact I still remember their keyboard shortcuts. I thought it was weird that ID didn’t have shortcuts for their Previous/Next page numbers and so I created them in my custom keyboard shortcut set about a week into my first ID project.

Still I have never seen the feature demo’d and explained so well, Michael, as in your video. Par for your course.

I’m almost positive that PageMaker had/has this same feature, btw.

Auto Page Number (meaning, “current page”), Previous and Next page numbers can also be used in the text flow; that is, part of the text, not in a separate text frame. They work the same: Auto Page number is the page number containing the frame where that special character is (that is, the “current” text frame), Next Page number is the page # that has the next frame in the thread, and Previous Page number is the page # with the previous frame in the thread. Embedding the special characters right in the text flow comes in handy sometimes.