Page Numbering Properties

[Joe Malin]

I'm confused.

Peter's survey shows exactly what I would expect:

1. some books use lowercase roman for front matter and then restart at 1
in Arabic for the body.
2. some books don't number the front matter, and then start at 1 in
Arabic for the body.
3. a few books have chosen the approach I am now taking; they start
numbering front matter at 1 and then
   continue through the body.

The only difference between what Peter described and what I'm doing is
that he doesn't mention the *format* use for style 3. I use Arabic
throughout.

FM can handle all three options, *if* option 3 uses the same number
formatting in front matter and body. If David's standard has to be used,
then FM won't work.

My own idiosyncratic opinion is that the standard David is using doesn't
make much sense. Why should one *format* front matter numbers
differently from body numbers, if they form a single sequence? The idea
of using different formats makes sense only if the sequences are
*different*.

If you had two numbering sequences, both in Arabic, simply telling them
apart within the book would be hard. Citations would be impossible, as
would indexing. But for one sequence, having a different format seems
only to differentiate between front matter and body. I'm not convinced
that this is necessary.

But, as Peter implied, I'm more interested in this as an entertaining
examination of the standard and not as a solution to David's problem.
That's why most of my message was an aside. I agree with Peter that FM
ought to provide the ability to separate page sequences from page
sequence formatting.

 

	 Joe Malin
Technical Writer
(408)625-1623
jmalin at tuvox.com 
www.tuvox.com
The views expressed in this document are those of the sender, and do not
necessarily reflect those of TuVox, Inc.	

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Gold [mailto:peter at knowhowpro.com] 
Sent: Monday, March 06, 2006 10:22 AM
To: Joe Malin; Wollenberger, David; Framers (FrameMaker List)
Subject: RE: Page Numbering Properties

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.