
Well, that’s about it! Of course, when it comes to tables, you do exactly the same thing, but you choose that other List and type “Table ^H-^1” in the Number field instead. When you click OK, the cross-ref appears: Then set the Format to Paragraph Number - after all, there’s no text in the paragraph you just want its “number.” Don’t forget to set Appearance to Invisible so that you don’t have incredibly ugly black rectangles all over your document. To do that, we needed Cross References (which are part of CS4 if you have CS3 you’d need the cross-references plug-in from dtptools, which is probably even better).įirst we place the text cursor where we want the x-ref in the text, and then we clicked the New Cross Reference button in the Hyperlinks panel:Ĭhoose the figure number paragraph style in the list on the left, and the specific figure you’re pointing at in the list on the right. For example, we wanted to refer to figure numbers like “See Figure 12-5”. Now that we have some figure numbers, we can point to them in the text. Delete of the frames, and the numbers all update, too. Once we had one of these, it was easy to duplicate the frame (with copy/paste or option/alt-drag) and the number automatically increases. When we apply this paragraph style to a line, the line is automatically numbered! But here’s the cool part: We just apply this to a blank line in a text frame and the figure number appears:Īnd then (after applying the paragraph style):

You can use that or just type your own number manually.) (The “chapter number” comes from the Layout > Numbering & Section Options dialog box. That means “insert the word Figure, followed by a space, followed by the chapter number, a dash, and the current list number. Notice that the List is chosen at the top, the Format follows the numbering scheme we want to use (regular Arabic numerals), and the Number field says “Figure ^H-^1”. Then we made two paragraph styles that used automatic number.

In our case we made two lists: FigureNumbers and TableNumbers (you can call them anything you want). What feature does that sound like? Yes, automatic paragraph numbering!Īs we’ve described elsewhere, you can set up frames that jump from one unthreaded frame to the next by first making a List.
ADOBE INDESIGN PAGE NUMBERS UPDATE
Of course, we want the numbers to increment by one, and to automatically update if we add or remove a figure.

In our case, it was based on the chapter number, such as “Figure 13-1” or “Table 2-4”. I’ll use a “real world example” and share how Ole Kvern and I handled figure and table numbers in Real World InDesign CS4.Įvery figure or table needs a unique number.
ADOBE INDESIGN PAGE NUMBERS HOW TO
Here’s a very common InDesign problem: How to add figure numbers throughout a document (or more than one document, if working with a book).
