Joe Malin wrote:
Keen readers of Chicago's online Q&A will recognize this issue from last
month; I was the one who asked the question. Alas, they didn't quite
understand my point. The standard of numbering front and back matter
separately from the body makes sense in a traditional world, and I
suppose that it should be the standard if you are going to have only one
single standard to cover every situation. But in a book generated from
FM, where one can re-paginate at the click of a button, I think the
standard has no useful purpose.
I disagree. From a writer's or publisher's perspective, you are correct
that page numbering is no longer a technical or practical problem... But
from a READER's perspective, separate (roman) numbering for front matter
is valuable because it helps the reader navigate the book. If you're on
page 81 and you want to turn to the first page of the first chapter, you
turn to page 1 in a traditionally-numbered book. In your continuously
numbered example, you either hunt at random, or hunt for the first page
of the TOC and then hunt for page 19 or whatever it happens to be. Also,
readers have simply come to expect that front matter will be numbered
differently from the body of the book, and seeing a departure from that
tradition simply detracts from the professional impression and/or
credibility of the work.
There's lots of examples of traditions in methods and naming that are
technically outdated, yet still meaningful and useful. When was the last
time you actually heard a phone "ring"?
(And although you are cc'd in the address line, no "carbon" copies were
harmed in the making of this message ;-)
sr
--
Stuart Rogers
Technical Communicator
Phoenix Geophysics Limited
Toronto, ON, Canada
+1 (416) 491-7340 x 325
srogers phoenix-geophysics com
"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
- Mark Twain
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