Book pagination confusion

[Tim Pann]

Thank you for your insights Fred. Very helpful.

 

The back story here is that I'm the Technical Trainer at my company, and
the group I reside in is separate from the Technical Writers. In the
process of generating training content I always write fully published
instructional guides to distribute to my learning audience. For page
number formatting I want to be consistent with the Technical Writing
team, so I refer to the documents they publish. The documents I've seen
number front matter in roman, and then the content is numeric and a
continuation of the front matter. So their documents are numbered, for
example, i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi, 7, 8, 9. Really!!

 

This morning I went and asked one of the writers about it and she said,
"Well, that's a mistake. We're supposed to start content at page 1." In
their defense, I now see, going back and looking at other docs, that
some do start content on page 1.

 

You learn something every day. A pox on me, of course, for not referring
to a style guide. There it is in The Chicago Manual of Style, page 5.
The fifth page after the front matter. Doh!

 

Tim

 

From: Fred Ridder [mailto:docudoc at hotmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2011 7:52 AM
To: Tim Pann; framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: RE: Book pagination confusion

 

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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