Automatic Page Insertion

Importing a long text layout can be a harrowing experience when you’re working with automatically linked text boxes. The text flows beyond page one and—it seems—into the netherworld. Where does the rest of the text go when the first text box is filled? QuarkXPress lets you control this with the Auto Page Insertion popup menu in the General panel of the Preferences dialog box. You have four choices: End of Story, End of Section, End of Document, and Off. The default setting (the way it’s set up if you don’t change anything) is End of Story.

End of Story. With the End of Story option selected, QuarkXPress inserts new pages right after the page containing the last text box in a story, and they bear the master-page formatting of the page that held that box. For instance, if your story starts on page one and jumps to page five, any text overflow from the page-five text box causes one or more pages to be inserted following page five, not page one.

End of Section. If you select End of Section, pages are inserted after the last page in a section (see the “Sections and Page Numbering” section, later in this chapter). Additional pages bear the master-page formatting of the last page in that section. Thus, if your page-one story jumps to page five, and page five is part of a section that ends with page eight, new pages inserted because of text overflow appear right after page eight.

End of Document. This option causes pages to be inserted after the last page of the layout, no matter how long the layout is and regardless of any sections you might have set up. Inserted pages bear the master-page formatting of the last page of the layout.

If you have only one story and one section in a layout, then these three settings all have the same effect.

Off. When Auto Page Insertion is set to Off, QuarkXPress never adds pages automatically. Instead, you must add pages manually (see “Making Pages,” earlier in this chapter). I often set Auto Page Insertion to Off when I get tired of XPress adding lots of new pages for me (this is also the setting I typically recommend to new users, who get skittish when XPress adds pages automatically). Then I’ll insert pages as I need or want them, linking them manually or using the Insert Pages dialog box.

Text Linking

Remember, the Automatic Page Insertion feature only works if the master page that’s getting inserted has an automatic text-link box. That makes sense, because pages are always inserted based on text flowing through the automatic text chain. You cannot have automatic page insertion without an automatic text link, and you cannot have that without an automatic text-link box.