InDesign Page Stacking!

Hello! I am designing a document that will be viewed and distributed digitally upon publishing. Does anyone know how to make pages stack directly on top of each other vertically? See attached screenshot for an example of the current distance between two pages. I want them to be like touching, or very close.

I’ve been searching around YouTube but haven’t found a way to do this while preserving the current design on the pages. Let me know!

I don’t know how to eliminate it, but you can reduce the size of the pasteboard by doing Indesign > Preferences > General > Guides and Pasteboard, and setting the vertical margin to 0.

I don’t know if this will work for you, or for output. I only do it horizontally when someone sends me a mural file in InDesign. But you can do it vertically, I just don’t know if the PDF will print correctly. It views correctly, but didn’t try to print it.

I also don’t know if this works with an existing layout.
I could be putting you in a world of trouble with this.

So proceed with caution (on a copy of your doc, not your original).

Go to your page palette.

  • Click the hamburger upper right.
  • Uncheck: Allow Document Pages to Shuffle
  • Uncheck: Allow Selected Spread to shuffle
  • In the palette page view, manually drag your pages up until they align in a horizontal row. You have to get it just right. You should see a page-sized ] symbol that means it’s connected (This is what allows me to paginate murals in this config.)
  • You can take it a step further and cllick that hamburger again and select View Page > Click By Alternate Layout.
  • Then go to Hamburg > Page Attributes> Rotate spread view and select a direction. You may have to change the orientation of your page layout.

How will the file be distributed? As a PDF? If that’s the case, the pages will “stack” in the PDF.

That’s why I said mine could be a bad idea. For me, where most of the files I receive are one-offs, it wouldn’t matter if the PDF were stacked rather than spreads.

While you can set some “initial view” options for a PDF that may or may not be honored on the other end, ultimately the reading layout is user-controlled in the viewing application.

I get the impression the OP really wants one big, vertical page that can be scrolled continuously without page gaps. (Remember when scrolling was a bad thing?) The only way to get that in PDF is to design it that way.

The way I interpreted the situation is that the OP wanted multiple pages without big gaps between the pages — which is default with a PDF. But I could be completely wrong.

I wouldn’t say you’re completely wrong. But in terms of page display, there really is no default “with a PDF”. A default view would be imposed by the application in which the PDF is opened. Including browser plugins, mobile, and 3rd party, there are many PDF viewers. Some of them at least, including Acrobat & Acrobat Reader, allow the user to set their own default. The PDF creator has little control.