Book pagination confusion

[Fred Ridder]

The behavior you describe is actually exactly appropriate for the way the pages in bound books were traditionally numbered. The whole point of the convention of using lower-case Roman numbers for the front matter was to have a different, independent numbering scheme that would not affect the numbering of the text pages. The front matter numbering used a different presentation style to signal the fact that it actually was a different, independent numbering sequence. The text always began on Arabic-numbered page 1 regardless of whether it was preceded by 4 pages or 44 pages of Roman-numbered front matter. In the days when the table of contents and index were manually compiled from galley pages, the last thing that a publisher would ever want was for the numbering on the text pages to change due to some last-minute change in the length of a preface or foreword. 
 
Having said that, in this era of tool-generated ToCs and indexes the technical reason for always starting the text on page 1 has largely disappeared. There may still be esthetic or legal (and in some cases usability) rationales for starting the text on page 1, but it's no longer something that is necessitated by the limitations of the publishing process. 

But if the first text page doesn't need to be numbered 1 (for whatever reason), what is the purpose of using Roman numbering for the front matter pages? The page numbers are part of a single, uninterrupted, front-to-back scheme so making any of them look different only seems to cause confusion.
 
-Fred Ridder

 


Subject: RE: Book pagination confusion
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 09:09:27 -0700
From: TPann at telecomsys.com
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
CC: rshuttleworth at avbasesystems.com








As I play around with different settings it’s become clear that when I set a file’s page numbering to “Continue Numbering From Previous Page in Book,” Framemaker forces the page numbering format (Numeric, Roman, etc.) to be that of the previous file.
 
When I set my TOC’s page number format to Roman, I didn’t select “Continue Numbering From Previous Page in Book,” I set “First Page #” to 3, which is safe because the Title file is before it and it’s always going to be two pages.
 
The next file after the TOC is Chap1, and I want that and subsequent chapters’ number format to be Numeric. The only way I can do that is by setting Chap1’s number format to Numeric AND set its “First Page #” to 7 (the TOC is currently 4 pages). If I instead select “Continue Numbering From Previous Page in Book,” Frame forces Chap1’s pages to be Roman.
 
This seems inappropriate. I can’t both continue numbering from the previous file AND change the number format? Very odd. I don’t like that Frame forces me to set Chap1’s first page at 7 rather than looking at the previous file.
 
Tim
  		 	   		  
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