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Indesign | Automatisch nummeren

List Numbering

First, create a numbering "list" by choosing Type > Bulleted & Numbered Lists > Define Lists. Then click New to create a new list. You can name it anything you want, but make sure the Continued Numbers across Stories is enabled:

numberedtickets2
numberedtickets2

After you click OK and close the Define Lists dialog box, create a text frame and type any character (such as a space). You need at least one space to make the autonumbering kick in.

Now Option/Alt-click on the Autonumbering button in the Control panel (or choose Bullets and Numbering from the Control panel flyout menu) and choose the list you created in the Lists pop-up menu. You might want to adjust the other settings to match this:

numberedtickets4
numberedtickets4

Now you’re done. Click OK and you should see the number appear in the text frame. To make more numbers, just duplicate this frame. Every time you make a new frame, InDesign increments the number automatically. Note that in the following image, the frames are not threaded together:

numberedtickets3
numberedtickets3

Master Pages
You may be tempted to place this number on a master page. That would make sense, but there’s a catch: Autonumbered paragraphs on a master page don’t update until you override them. That is, you have to Command/Ctrl-Shift-click on them to make them "kick in" and update to the correct number.

So what if you need 20 pages of tickets? 100? 1000? Doing that without a master page is annoying, but Anne-Marie suggested to me a great workaround:

  1. Go ahead and put the items on a master page.
  2. On the document page, override the items by Command/Ctrl-Shift-dragging over them (or clicking on them).
  3. Select that one page and duplicate it in the Pages panel, or by choosing Layout > Pages > Duplicate Spread.
  4. Select the original page and the duplicate and then copy those. Repeat this (select pages and duplicate) until you have enough pages.

Unfortunately, InDesign isn’t exactly speedy at updating these numbers when you add a bunch of pages. But it’s not hard to duplicate and reduplicate until you have a thousand or more numbered tickets.

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