I have a situation (hymnal) where some flows are one page long, others are two pages long. Some of the flows start on the Right page, others on the Left. I need certain content from the flow info placed at the bottom of the first page of each flow but no content at the bottom of the 2nd page. The “first” page template contains something totally different so I can’t use the “first” template for the start of flows (which would be the obvious solution). The typical L/R default page won’t work as sometimes the flow starts on the left, sometimes the right. I know I can create a template and insert a page template change but with dozens of flows to change, I’m hoping there’s an easier way. (Deleting the offending text frame in Engrave mode is so far the quickest way and a decent way to do it). I don’t know if it would be worth the time or if there is enough demand for it, but in addition to left and right templates, perhaps having alternating page templates would be a nice addition?
Ultimately, master page changes are indeed what are supposed to handle these situations.
There’s also been requests in the past for footers, just like there are flow headers. If those are implemented, this would become substantially easier because you could set up an appropriate flow header and footer to handle things like this dynamically.
The approach I would use is to change my FIRST Page Template (Master Page) to what you need for the start of each flow.
Then create a custom Page Template that mimics the traditional First Page to use only as the first page of your document.
Assign the custom First Page Template to the actual first page of your document and tell your layout(s) to use the real First Page Template whenever a flow starts a new page. This way, one only has to override the Page Template for the initial page of your document.
You can save this new Page Template Set for use in the future if you need it again.
Thanks. About an hour or two after posting I figured out the solution is doing exactly what you said.
I’ll put in a vote for footers.
What kind of footers do you need that you cannot create yourself in a custom Page Template?
Unless you mean footnotes, which is a different (more complicated) matter to program.
I’m referring to footers at the bottom (end) of flows. (This assumes that layout settings have flows allowed to start on existing pages selected). If I have two flows on a single page, never starting at the same vertical location, how do I put content unique to each flow (eg. tokens from the flow info) at the end (bottom) of the flow? I can put content at the start of flows, but not at the end of flows. We can’t put tokens in Shift-X text or I’d do it that way. If each flow (dozens, hundreds perhaps, like in a songbook) is at a different vertical location, how does a single custom page template help? I know I can do lots of great things with flow frames and text frames but if the length of the music is different for each flow (like with hymns), then it might require a different custom template for each page. That could be a lot of work. The less steps involved, the better. I know I could cut and paste info from the flow info into a shift-x text entry, but that’s not always ideal if the flow info needs to be changed for some reason.
Whether such an idea is a good one or not, I’m not sure I would consider that a footer, strictly speaking, since if a flow is not the final flow on a page, the attached text would not be at the foot of the page.
Yes creating a layout like a hymnal is hard work.
Which is why we’ve requested to be allowed to have it at the end of the flow or the bottom of the page on which it should otherwise appear. Both options would have their uses.
Strictly speaking, footers (running footers, that is) already exist, but intelligent, page-attached footnotes do not.
What James seems to want appears related to the capability to add attacca at the end of a flow below the bottom staff (IIRC Daniel seems to have mentioned this as a possibility down the road), although James specifies that he wants to be able to include tokens in the text.
One of the challenges is similar to that of adding Cue text to Flow Headers, in that dynamically vertically sized fields are not yet possible for text.