How to Type Page Numbers in Sectioned Documents

I’ve gotten a few questions recently about typing page numbers in InDesign documents that have sections, or in documents that are part of a book. For example, let’s say you use the Section & Numbering Options dialog box (in the Pages panel menu) to set the first page of your document to start on page 17, and to use roman numerals. How do you jump to the fifth page of the file? Or, similarly, how do you print the fifth page? You can’t type “5” because there is no page 5 in the document. Instead, you must do one of two things:

• You can type the actual page “name.” For example, the fifth page of the document described above is “xxi” (21 in roman numerals).
• You can type an absolute page number by placing a plus sign (+) in front of the number. For example, +5 means the fifth page. To print the fifth through the tenth pages, you would type the awkward phrase: +5-+10. In this case, the plus sign has nothing to do with math!

Here are a few other page number blog posts that people need to know about.

• Get Rid of the Absurd Section Prefix
• How to Add Page Numbers
• What’s that Number in the Lower Left Corner

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