Master Pages are pages on which you place items that you want to appear on several, or all, pages of a document. You can place any items on Master Pages, but they are commonly used for:
'In Design' allows you to have several Master Pages, and pages in the document can be allocated to whichever Master Page is most appropriate.
A new 'In Design' document is created with either one or two default Master Pages, depending on whether the document has been created with 'Facing Pages' or not. A 'Facing Pages' document has two Master Pages (left and right) whilst a 'non-Facing Pages' document only has one. In either case they are referred to as the 'A' Master Pages.
To see the layout of pages and their allocation to Master Pages, click on 'Window/Pages' to bring up the Pages Palette.
The top section of this palette (above the horizontal line) indicates the Master Pages. To open the 'A' Master Page(s), double-click on the A-Master icon.
This will open up the A-Master pages so you can place objects on to them. Remember that although it seems as if you are just working on ordinary pages, these are in fact a special case, and objects placed here will affect all other pages allocated to these masters.
When using 'Facing Pages' masters, all items placed on the left Master Page will appear on all left pages (normally 2, 4, 6, etc.) whilst all items placed on the right Master Page will appear on all right pages (1, 3, 5, etc.)
To place a page number on to a Master Page, first draw a text frame using
the Type Tool 
.
This frame may be quite small as it will only have to hold one or two characters.
Instead of typing into the frame, select 'Type/Insert Special Character/Markers/Current Page Number'. The character 'A' will appear in the frame (for A-Master pages)
but this will show as a number on the 'real' pages.
It is usual to position the page numbers just outside the page margins so that they do not overlap the body text.
Do not go too close to the edge of the page, however, or your printer may cut off all or part of your page numbers.
Page numbers can be top or bottom, centred, left or right. In the case of 'Facing Page' documents, you can position the left and right page numbers separately.
Borders can be added on any page, but if you require borders on multiple pages, it makes more sense to use the Master Pages for this purpose.
Using the Rectangle Tool 
draw
a border outside the page margins on the appropriate Master Page. For 'Facing
Page' documents you may want to have borders on left and right Master Pages.
[Note: the border may appear blue when you expect it to be black or some other colour. This is because 'In Design' shows frame edges by default. To hide the frame edges and show the border in its true colour, select 'View/Hide Frame Edges'.]
To choose the width and line type of the border, click on 'Window/Stroke' to display the Stroke Palette. To show all the options on this palette, click on the arrow at top right and select 'Show Options'. The palette now looks like this:
Use the 'Weight' and 'Type' boxes to adjust the border to your requirements.
You may need to zoom in with the Zoom Tool 
to
see clearly what the border will look like. Check on an actual page (rather
than a Master Page) to see whether your border is a suitable distance away
from your text.
Sometimes you might want to add a small logo to each page, perhaps in the top corner. Again, this is best done on the Master Pages.
Select the Master Pages and 'Place' the logo in the required position in the same way as on a normal page.
The difficulty with this is that the text will overlay the logo on the document pages:
To overcome this you will need to apply text wrap to the logo on the Master Page(s). See 'Arranging text and images'.
To put a background on to a Master Page, follow the same procedure as for logos, except that of course backgrounds generally cover the whole page, or a substantial part of it.
A problem often associated with backgrounds is that the chosen image is too strong, and makes the text difficult to read:
To remedy this, alter the opacity of the image on the Master Page:
Select the Master Page, select the image with the Selection Tool 
and
bring up the Transparency Palette by clicking 'Object/Effects/Transparency'.
Alter the Opacity Control to fade the image:
On the main pages, check to see if the text is now readable:
Sometimes, having applied masters to a document, there are some pages where you don't want the master items to appear.
To hide master items on a particular page, display that page on the screen, then use the drop-down at the top-right of the pages palette to select 'Hide Master Items'. Note that for 'Facing Page' documents, this will apply to the double-page spread rather than individual pages.
Note that although the master items may be hidden, any text-wrap applied to them will still remain in place. To overcome this, you can actually remove a specific master item from a particular page as follows:
It is possible in 'In Design' to have a number of Master Pages, and allocate the actual document pages to the appropriate masters as required.
To create new Master Pages, click on the arrow at the top right of the Pages Palette and choose 'New Master'. A dialogue box appears:
You can choose the name and prefix of your new Master Page(s), and whether or not they will be based on an existing Master. (If you opt to base them on an existing Master, you will be creating a hierarchy of Masters, in which alterations to the top level will be reflected in your subsidiary Masters, and so on.)
After clicking 'OK', the Page Palette will show the new Master Page(s).
Place objects on the new Masters in the same way as before. To apply the new Master Pages to particular document pages, click and drag in the Pages Palette from the Master icon to the icon for the appropriate pages.
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