The Mystery of the Fickle Folio Contest Answer and Winner

Mike Rankin

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It’s time to reveal the solution—and the winner—for this month’s InDesignSecrets contest! 

Here’s the scenario: 

You’re managing a project where you send out article layout templates to freelance designers. The designers are responsible for designing the layout of their articles and flowing the text. You send them a template, and receive their finished InDesign files and assemble those in a Book file for output.

template file

finished file from designer

During proofing, you discover that the page numbers are in the wrong font for one of the articles.

incorrect page number formatting

They’re still formatted with the same style that you set up before you sent the file to the designer.

The style definition is the same and there are no overrides.

And the designer says he never edited the page number style.

Everything else is OK.

Why are the page numbers in this chapter in the wrong font?

Solution: The page number style (along with all the other paragraph styles) was based on the Basic Paragraph style.

The ability to base styles on a “parent” style gives you tremendous power to adjust the formatting of text throughout a document. It also gives you tremendous power to mess things up if you’re not careful.

In this case, the designer wanted to change the font used by all the other styles and knew that editing the definition of Basic Paragraph would accomplish this in one step. But that person didn’t notice that the page number was also based on Basic Paragraph.

Even more unwelcome formatting changes might occur if this file is placed into a Book and styles are synchronized.

These issues could’ve been avoided if the template had been set up in such a way that the page number style was not based on the same parent style as the rest of the text, and that none of the styles got their font information from the Basic Paragraph style. Check out Anne-Marie’s post 3 Ways to Change the Default Font in InDesign (Don’t Edit [Basic Paragraph]!) for more on this topic.

And the winner of this contest is…

Frédéric Momméja

Frédéric wins 3 months access to videos of any 2 days of CreativePro Week 2017.

Thanks to everyone who entered, and be on the lookout for another contest with a new great prize next month!