Text Variables on Master Slide in InDesign CS6

Question

Currently I want to neatly organise a batch of 500 PDFs in one InDesign document. I placed them slide by slide into my document, and now I thought of adding a small box on the corner of each slide which indicates the names of the individual PDF files. I did this via the

Type > Text Variables > Insert Variable > Image Name

option. Adding the box and the variable to the master slide adds it on every page, but it does not "intersect" with the images/PDFs, thus it does not recognise the file names ("< No intersecting link >").

Is there another way to solve this, apart from adding the box with the variable to every page individually?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

1. Setup your text frame and variable in the master page

2. Select all existing pages in the pages panel

3. Right click and select Override All Master Page Items (or cmd+alt+SHIFT+L)

Your text variables now behave as you want them to.

One thing to note, If you make any changes to the overridden items in your document, any changes you make to the master page won't be reflected in your document.

To get around this, all you need to do is select the affected page in the pages panel and Apply Master to Pages.... Then repeat the process of overriding to fix your variables.