Quark Forums

In All previous versions of Xpress, Odd numbered pages are Right hand Pages and Even numbered pages are Left hand Pages. We built our workflow and training around that, and the fact that when you add or delete a single page, that the page layout automatically reflows. Now, in XPress 8, that does not happen and the page layout has to be adjusted manually, and you have to move pages back and forth across the spine in the Page Layout Palette, because an odd numbered page can now be a left hand page and vice versa...UGH!!

 That is strange, and something that I hadn't noticed before, but I'm getting what you are getting.

I made a new project with 8 facing-pages, put page numbers on the master, added a section start to page 4, which would have moved it to the right in previous versions, but in 8.12, it stays on the left. I did find a workaround, though.

If you drag a new page thumbnail in the page layout pallet to the left of what is now the new section's page 1 (that used to be page 4) and don't let go of the mouse button until you see the icon changed from a page to a right-pointing arrow, it will drop the new page in place of the new page 1, and move the new page 1 over to the right where it belongs. The following pages will change from left to right also. The page you just dropped in place will be numbered with the previous section you have set up (so in my case, it becomes page 4).

Now, there was one funny thing that happened. I had a red box on my left master, and a blue box on my right master, just so I could track the pages visually. The page number was on top of the colored box. When I added my new page 4, the colored box on page 1 (the real page 1, not the new section's page 1) jumped in front of the page number text box. I removed the new page 4 and then dragged a new one where the old one had been, and page 1 went back to being correct. I'm not sure why something upstream should have been effected by adding a page downstream, but maybe someone else can see if they get the same results.

Anyway, that's a workaround that will save you from having to drag all of the pages to the correct side of the spread manually.

EDIT: I should probably add that changing page 4 to page 1 isn't something that I would normally do. Whether or not you want a new page 1 in the mix, there needs to be a page 4 of some sort (whether it has content or not), so if I had wanted what was on page 4 to become a new page 1, I would have probably added a new page 4 first, then created the section start on page 5. You get to the same place either way, but it helpes keep me straight when I work this way.

Migman Thanks....Yeah....we kinda figured that one out....Our Workflow is such that we use multiple files to create a "Book", as we can throw multiple resources on one "Book". We do not use the Book feature in Quark as we have created a custom XT that manages, prints, creates PDFs, repurpose our "Books" to HTML. Additionally, our clients like to work the "Books" from beginning to end as a book, and therefore, they are adding and deleting pages at will, which, as we migrate to XPress 8, is going to challange our users who are used to just changing the section start on a file and having all the pages just flop into place. Sounds to me like i am going to have to add that feature to a custom XT if we are going to keep that same functionality....ish Thanks again for your reply, and if you come accross something i have missed, like a toggle, that sets standard folios vs chinese folios, would you let me know?

This change was made in version 8 to accommodate right-to-left paging systems for our new universal file format (we no longer have separate versions of QuarkXPress for Japan, Korea, and China). We also had a lot of customers request the ability to begin a layout or section with a left-facing page. There is no setting to prohibit left-facing odd pages, maybe there should be. For now if you want the legacy behavior to be enforced automatically then you probably would have to put it into your XTension.

Dan Logan
Product Manager, QuarkXPress

Thanks Dan....I figured as much....although a toggle to turn that functionality on/off would be helpful....And i do realize that this new functionality is helpful as we have a few clients that actually want chinese folios, and the hoops we have had to jump through in the past to accommodate it in a production environment were a hassle Thanks Again

Thanks Dan, it makes me understand why you have made this idiotic change, but it is no help to us. I am sure a lot of developers like us have been depending on this feature you had to automatically change to the left masterpage for even page number. If you say a lot of customers have requested that not to happen, you have no idea how many users were satisfied with the solution how it used to work. Nobody claims if it works!

You should have added a preference setting for how it should work!

This is a real big issue for our customers, and I have no work around. It isn´t possible to get around manually (I could explain this better, but not expected things happens if I change side in the document palette window).

Is this an issue to be evaluated, or have you made your final decission?