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.
I don't know of a good option. The standard you seem to be working from
isn't one that I've heard of. Every mainstream style guide I've seen
says that front matter should be numbered separately from the body. That
means that your chapter 1 should start on page 1 according to
commonly-accepted standards. The FM architecture is designed to conform
to those standards. I seriously doubt they'll change it, though I agree
that the numbering and the format shouldn't be connected.
I have a situation which I don't think is so unusual, and yet I can't
seem to figure out how to get FM to handle it.
Our TOC page numbering begins on iii and goes as long as it has to,
ending on an even page.
Our Chapter 1 begins on the next page after the TOC page. So if the TOC
is eight pages (iii-x), then the first page of Chapter 1 is 11.
Looking at FM's Numbering Properties dialog, Page tab, at first glance,
it would appear that I need to use Continue Numbering from Previous Page
in Book, but then the first page in Chapter 1 is numbered xi, even if I
set it to Numeric.
To my knowledge, the only way around this problem is to use First Page
and manually set the value to <number of pages in TOC + 3>, in this 11,
and set the style to Numeric.
This solution becomes cumbersome when publishing conditional books. For
example, I need to produce six books from the same set of source files.
The number of pages in the TOC can change from 6 to 8 to 10 depending on
which book I am publishing, so I have to manually reset the Page
Numbering Properties for Chapter 1 each time I publish version of the
book.
From my perspective, I could solve this if my company changed its
numbering standard to restart numbering on the first page of Chapter 1.
Unfortunately, that is not an option.
From FM's perspective, FM could solve this if the format (roman vs.
arabic) was not connected to restarting the page numbering, that is, you
shouldn't only get to change the format if you are restarting, you
should also get to change it if you are continuing.
--
Regards,
Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices
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