of all the groovy features released with CS5, the most longed-for must be the ability to have different page sizes in the one document. now you can have a whole stationery set in one file, or do tricky things with book covers without lots of guides and measuring and whatnot. once you get started with the page tool — near the top of your tool panel — you’ll wonder how you ever did without it.

this tip will use a book cover with flaps as its example. the page tool is easy to use — just grab the tool and click on the page (or pages) you want to adjust. you’ll get familiar fields up in your control panel :

of course, if you’re smart (and you know you are), you’d do this with your master pages and then drag the masters down to make your spread. here’s the 300x200mm covers with a 100mm flap at each end :

now (obviously) somewhere down the track the specs are going to change and you’ll need to add a 10mm spine to that cover. no worries, just make a 10mm wide page and drop it in … but what’s this? :

buggeration! but don’t panic. all it means is that you can’t have, for example, 15mm margins on a 10mm page. just set margins and columns appropriate for that page and you’ll be cruising :

ok, you got that sorted and now the client has come back with another change (don’t you just love your job?) — covers are now to be 250mm instead of 300mm. no worries just use the page tool to change your master and everything’s sweet … um … :

now that’s annoying. and it gets even more annoying when you try to drag those little buggers back into a nice neat spread in you pages panel — go on, try it, dare you.

but don’t despair, because the fix is pretty easy. just grab your page tool again and shift-click to select all the pages in the spread. in the control panel check the use spacing box, set the spacing to 0mm and hit the horizontal spacing button :

… and everything is hunky dory again :

there may well be limits to page sizes but there seems to be no problem making pages 1x1mm — so now you can go ahead and make that nano-book you’ve always dreamed of (you know you want to). go sick.