From the course: Designing a Book

Adding the running header - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: Designing a Book

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Adding the running header

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- [Instructor] Our book continues to take shape, and in this movie, we are going to add a running header to the top of the right-hand pages. You may remember, way back in Chapter One, we set up the folios, and I said, we are not yet in a position to create the running header. So we just put the book title in as a placeholder. Well, we now are in a position because we have all of the chapter titles, and they all have a paragraph style applied to them. I want the running header to appear on all of my document pages, so I need to add it on my master page spread. I should say that we are going to run into an issue here. It's not often you come up against this problem, but I want you to see the problem so that you realize why the solution exists. I'll press Command or Control + J to go to my master pages and type in A. Now, I'll zoom in to the top of my right-hand page. I'll select this placeholder text, come to my Type menu, and what I need here is a type variable. First of all, I need to define the type variable. The type of variable that we want is Running Header. I'll click on edit, and typically, we use a paragraph style running header, and not surprisingly, we want to use the Chapter Title paragraph style. It's going to look for the first one on the page, and we'll apply that here in the header until it encounters another paragraph style. I'll go ahead and not click Done, but click Insert to insert the running header into the text. Now I'll click Done. Now, when I go back to my document page, we see, here's the chapter title, here is that title picked up in the running header, and it remains there until we come across a different chapter title when it changes. Now, you may say, well, surely, we don't want these running headers on the chapter opening pages, and you're absolutely right, we don't, but we will address that in the next movie. Here, the problem that we encounter now is when we have chapter titles that are very long, and we have a couple of them. On page 122, we have a very long chapter title, and the problem with text variables is that the lines do not break. So we need come up with a different solution, and the different solution is to use a character style running header rather than a paragraph style. But before we can do that, we need to apply the character style to just a portion of the chapter titles so the running header knows which text to use. Then we come to my paragraph styles, and what I'm going to do here is convert my chapter title paragraph style into a nested style. So I'm doing a few things at once here. Just before I do this, though, I want to point out that, here, there is a colon the separates the two parts of the chapter title, and the other place where we have a problem is on page 217, where there is an em dash, so the punctuation is not consistent. But that's OK, we can work around that. I'm going to edit the chapter title, come to Drop Caps and Nested Styles, New Nested Style. I'll create the style on the fly, come to New Character Style, and I'm going to call it Running Head. Now, just temporarily, so we can see what's going on, I'm going to put it in a color. Obviously, we'll switch it back to black once we've confirmed that everything is behaving as it should. I'll click OK, and we see now that we have this character style applied to the first word. Well, that's no good. We need it to go through, or not actually through, but up to the em dash. So I'll type in the em dash. I'll also type in the colon or any other punctuation that may be used. We can just type them all in here, and whichever one it encounters, the character style will stop at that point. I don't want that included in the running head, so I need to change through to up to. So now, let's just take a look at our chapter titles. We see them. Where there is no punctuation, it will just apply the character style to the whole chapter title, and that's OK. Coming now to our problem text. I just need now to change the definition of the running head. I do not need to return to the master page. I can just come to the Type menu and down to my Text Variables, Define, Running Head, Edit Definition, and change it from a Paragraph Style to a Character Style, and then specify the running head character style that we created. And you see now, running heads are not too long. All that remains to be done now is just to change the definition of running head Back to Black, which by the way, is a fantastic Amy Winehouse song.

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