I am using free writer ver 25.2.7.2
My 183 page book manuscript is presenting a page numbering problem.
I have been able to start the page numbering starting with the first page of chapter one, but the front end material consists of ten pages.
The title and copyright pages show no numbers, but the remaining eight pages of the front end are numbered 3 to 8 before chapter one.
Could someone please advise how to eliminate the page numbering in the front end
Thanks for your help
Pages numbers are a property of page sequences, i.e. an explicitly bounded set of pages. All pages in the sequence share the same type and look of page numbers.
A sequence is associated to a page style which defines the geometry (margins and columns) and heading/footer characteristics.
Your first task is to define the various parts of your book. Usually you have a cover, some front material, perhaps a TOC, followed by the chapters. This implies four page styles (you can merge cover and front material if their layout and numbering is the same).
You will delimit the parts with a special page break. Insert>More Breaks>Manual Break pops up a dialog where you can choose the page style to activate after the break and reset the page number to any starting value.
You didn’t mention the save format. What is presented above is valid (and persistent) for .odt documents. If you save .doc(x), the concepts are very different and the cumulative conversion between DOC(X) and internal format will progressively damage the document structure, making next to impossible to fix the problems which inevitably happen.
Also, you didn’t describe how you format your book. With such a size, styling is mandatory IMHO. Otherwise tuning the look becomes an awful nightmare.
For more targeted advice, provide a few page sample of your document to evaluate your formatting skills.
Before you change your manuscript, I recommend starting a new document and defining all pages sequentially without inserting your running text:
Note that changing the page number after the fact is not good; this is done using the page type: I insert “manual break…” on the title page “a),” select the page “Preface/Prologue,” set the page number to “i” (starting anew; subsequent pages automatically: ii, iii,…), and then automatically generate as many “b)” pages as needed when text overflows.
After that, I insert “manual break…” again, select page “c)” with page number “A” (starting anew; subsequent pages: “B, C, …”), and repeat the procedure with “d)”, and so on.
Only then do I configure the page types as desired. I use WRiTER’s basic structure with its sequence “Right Page” → “Left Page” → “Right Page” → and so on.
With this scheme, every new consecutive page type starts with the number “1”, or “i”, or “A”, or with any other pre-selected number. The “secret” is that only with this method will the correct page numbers be incremented and displayed in the table of contents when using “Insert, Manual Break…”
Note: I wrote this on my smartphone without access to LI-Writer, so it could be improved!
Note: I tried about half a dozen designs to achieve the desired result.