Master pages refuse to be applied: RESOLVED

[Steve Rickaby]

I previously posted about some really weird things to do with master pages that apparently 'refused' to be applied. I thought folks might be interested in the reasons for what turned out to be, not one illusion, but two.

I was suffering from two 'problems':

1. In one part of the book, the body pages apparently refused to accept a change to the height of the main text frame on the master page.

2. Some pages appeared to 'reject' the master pages by refusing to display a page number.

Issue 1 was caused by a weirdness to do with the page zoom. Although all parts of the book had the same page size and the same zoom setting, without my noticing it, the problem section (the Preface) was not actually displaying the entire page to the top, leading to the visual illusion that the main text flow was the wrong height. Only a careful comparison of the vertical ruler revealed this. I have no idea of its cause, but dropping the zoom by 5% for all parts of the book 'cured' the 'problem'.

Issue 2 was a little more subtle. Again in the preface, the right page footer contained a Running H/F and a Roman page number. The Running H/F was not actually used in the Preface, and contained one blank space. On one page, and one page only, xxvii (which should have been a clue), the right-tab stop settings of the footer interacted to prevent the page number being displayed at all, leading to the illusion that the master page was not being applied. A small adjustment to the tab stop preceding the page number restored it.

Moral: things often 'aint what they seem.

-- 
Steve