Page Numbering Properties

[Peter Gold]

Hi, folks:

When this thread came up the other day, I thought "hmmm... that's 
interesting," and let it go. But now that it's gathering momentum, I 
took another look.

A quick look at several Adobe Classroom In A Book titles, the revered 
"all-time best" "FrameMaker 5.5 User's Guide," "FrameMaker 7: The 
Complete Reference," and Richard Hendel's "On Book Design," all use 
lowercase Roman numbers for front matter, and restart body matter at 
page 1 in Arabic style. Some other non-technical books I scanned 
either do not number front matter pages at all, and begin body matter 
at page 1, or number front matter from page 1 and continue through 
body matter.

So, David's approach doesn't seem rare or odd. I don't have FM 
earlier than 7.x installed, so I can't test this, but my first 
reaction to David's original post was, "I thought you could do that 
in FM." Perhaps this has changed since some earlier release. Anyone 
care to test it and let us know?

It's likely that quoting authorities on one or the other side of the 
issue won't resolve the matter any more than the recurring threads on 
how many spaces should appear between sentences, or "are the widows 
the ones left stranded at the end of a text frame, or are those the 
orphans, or maybe it's only a line consisting of a single word left 
behind or pushed ahead?"

David's suggestion to enhance FM so the user can choose to change 
numbering styles is worth posting to the feature request forum. 
InDesign permits this.

>I don't know of a good option. The standard you seem to be working from
>isn't one that I've heard of. Every mainstream style guide I've seen
>says that front matter should be numbered separately from the body. That
>means that your chapter 1 should start on page 1 according to
>commonly-accepted standards. The FM architecture is designed to conform
>to those standards. I seriously doubt they'll change it, though I agree
>that the numbering and the format shouldn't be connected.


>I have a situation which I don't think is so unusual, and yet I can't
>seem to figure out how to get FM to handle it.
>
>Our TOC page numbering begins on iii and goes as long as it has to,
>ending on an even page.
>
>Our Chapter 1 begins on the next page after the TOC page. So if the TOC
>is eight pages (iii-x), then the first page of Chapter 1 is 11.
>
>Looking at FM's Numbering Properties dialog, Page tab, at first glance,
>it would appear that I need to use Continue Numbering from Previous Page
>in Book, but then the first page in Chapter 1 is numbered xi, even if I
>set it to Numeric. 
>
>To my knowledge, the only way around this problem is to use First Page
>and manually set the value to <number of pages in TOC + 3>, in this 11,
>and set the style to Numeric.
>
>This solution becomes cumbersome when publishing conditional books.  For
>example, I need to produce six books from the same set of source files.
>The number of pages in the TOC can change from 6 to 8 to 10 depending on
>which book I am publishing, so I have to manually reset the Page
>Numbering Properties for Chapter 1 each time I publish version of the
>book.
>
>>From my perspective, I could solve this if my company changed its
>numbering standard to restart numbering on the first page of Chapter 1.
>Unfortunately, that is not an option.
>
>>From FM's perspective, FM could solve this if the format (roman vs.
>arabic) was not connected to restarting the page numbering, that is, you
>shouldn't only get to change the format if you are restarting, you
>should also get to change it if you are continuing.

-- 
Regards,

Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices