Counting Page One and Other Pages

Click here for the first installment in this series, which introduced the basic problems of desktop publishing.

The previous installment in this series discussed the problematic issue of blank pages in books and booklets.

Click here for the previous installment in this series, which explained some problems of blank pages.

We will now consider the issue of numbering the pages themselves.

You may have thought that pages are numbered from Page 1. However, this is not necessarily the case.

(Actually, it's more likely that you never thought about the numbering of the pages at all!).

Many books begin with several introductory pages, including a preface, introduction, table of contents, possibly a portrait of the author, acknowledgments, and other, additional items.

These elements are set apart from the book by the numbering scheme - which is usually in Roman numerals.

The book may end with an epilogue, appendixes, an index, or other elements, which may or may not be numbered with this separate different system.

It's important to clarify that the first signature in a book does not necessarily begin with Page 1. Desktop publishing and word processing programs have features that allow the first page of any chapter to be printed without a number.

Indeed, books rarely show Page One at all. Book publishers seem to follow introductory pages with just about any imaginable possibility in order to assure that the book will start on page 3 or 7 (or any other odd number), rather than Page One.

Click here for the third part of this series, which explains the strange way in which the signatures themselves are arranged.

Desktop publishing programs may be able to relate to different numbering systems in the beginning and the end of a book. They may be able to number the pages properly in order to set up the signatures.