I’m not looking for a technical solution here, i searched and found a few threads that pretty much summed up the fun and games i’ve had with Word in the past. Anyway, after some wrestling i usually get my own way, but that’s not what i’m asking. I want to know about the theory.
Every standard template i’ve ever seen numbers pages starting at 1 for the cover page and proceeding from there. Now, in most publications i see the cover is not numbered. Furthermore, the contents pages and other blurb pages at the front are generally numbered seperately (often in roman numerals) with page numbering restarting at 1 on the first actual page of the *content * (i.e. story or whatever).
Now that makes sense to me. Page 1 is the first page that actually contains the content. The cover page, distribution list, version control matrix, and contents page aren’t contents are they?
So what say you folks? Is numbering cover to back page as one big sequence just laziness on the part of the template creators? Or is that the correct way to do it?
No. The technical term for them is “front matter”, and you’re right that they are usually not paginated with the actual body of the document.
On the other hand, items appearing after the body of the document, such as endnotes, bibliography, index, etc., also have their own separate name (“back matter”), and yet they are usually paginated along with the document body. Go figure.
I’d suggest that there are really different “standards” in effect for documents inended to be consumed electronically vice those that might be created electronically but will be consumed only on paper.
I’d also suggest that this whole area is in flux, where the relative certainties of book-binding practice in 1975 are being shaken by modern practice in response to modern needs.
For an all-electronic publication, my personal opinion is that traditional numbering schemes with separate numbering for cover sections, forewards, etc., are a bad idea. Better to number everything from page 1 for the very front cover to page n for the very last index/appendix/whatever. There are two reasons I can readily see for my thought:
It facilitates navigating in the “book” in the viewer app. Few things are sillier than looking at a document with a page labeled “10-5” (i.e. section 10, page 5) on screen & having to guess how to move the viewer app to page “9-8” whe the app itself (e.g. Adobe Acrobat) only understands the document as page 1 to page n. Yes, the document can have an embedded page-by-page table of contents to translate logical and physical page numbers, but that’s a crutch to support a bad habit, not a strength.
If I do print out some pages for reference or to take notes on, and those pages cross a numbering boundary then I have no idea if I’ve lost a sheet somewhere. In a bound book you don’t have to wonder if the page after 9-8 is 9-9 or 10-1. But when each sheet is loose, you do have that problem.
A big part of the reason for traditional page-numbering systems in printed books is the way the books were typeset. Generally, they started with chapter 1, and went through to the end, before setting the front matter or the index. Then some proofs were run off: of those, one went to the author, to check for typos, and another went to the indexer (who couldn’t really start on the index until there were page numbers attached to the text). Then the front matter got put together, including the table of contents (which again couldn’t have page numbers until the main part was typeset), and the index was typeset.
Of course, you could guess how many pages of front matter there were – but if the author decided to write 4 pages of acknowledgments (a job traditional one of the last), that might stuff up your numbering, so you used a separate sequence for the front matter. You don’t have the same problem with appendixes, bibliography and index at the back, so they could be part of the main sequence. But computerisation of the whole process has changed everything, so these considerations really no longer apply.