Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
Gary Schnabl wrote:
According to the CMoS, the arabic numbering would start with the
exposition after the front matter (for us, the ToC). And of course,
the front matter would generally be lowercase roman. We do ours a bit
differently--using arabic for the ToC also.
Yes, we decided to *NOT* do it the CMOS (and standard "printed book")
way, because our chapters and books are now designed for ease-of-use
for PDF readers, who mostly do NOT want the page numbers to differ
from the sequence number in the PDF... that is, start at 1 on the
title page and continue unchanged through the chapter (or book).
... Doing the chapter-page or the sequential numbering makes more
sense than continually restarting the numbering at 1 for each
chapter, and it's not complicated at all.
The idea is easy in principle, and works fine under some
circumstances, but not all of those circumstances apply in our chapters.
When I tried to do this several years ago, I found that implementing the
chapter-page numbering scheme in the stand-alone chapters is complicated
(technically), at least if you want the ToC to show the chapter numbers.
I forget all the details, but I remember clearly that each time we
solved one problem, we created another.
--Jean
One major consideration of the user guides is to guide the user towards
doing more than just the "vanilla" authoring/editing concept and
functions. And we might also eat more of our own home cooking in the
process.
I spent a few years as a teacher and know that kids a decade ago in the
US were using the school computers already in the first or second grade,
even kindergarten in my last parochial school in inner-city
Detroit--hardly a bastion for academic prowess. By the time they enter
middle school (grade 6 or 7), they already knew and used Word for their
class work and all. Perhaps, our manuals should evolve away from doing
just the simplest of tasks.
Gary
