[scribus] Master Pages, page numbering

[Gregory Pittman]

For the benefit of others who may have a hard time understanding Master
Pages and Page numbering, Herry Vos and I had some interchanges that in
part went like this:

Hi Herry,

Keep in mind that Master Pages and the "regular pages" are two separate
areas to edit. Consider the Master Page to be a layer underneath all the
other layers of a page. Let's start by just playing around with a new
empty document with a few pages.

Click, from the menu, Edit > Master Pages... and the Manage Master Pages
dialog pops up. The canvas (the page you're working on) looks the same,
and you see Normal highlighted in the dialog -- this is the default
Master Page that all documents have. It's also worth mentioning that
each document page can only be assigned one kind of Master Page.

Let's imagine for simplicity's sake that you will only have a single
Master Page, and you will place the page number in the middle of the
bottom of the Normal Master Page. Make a text frame there of a suitable
size. Double-click on that frame and you enter Edit Contents mode, where
you can type directly into the frame. At this point you can either type
Ctrl+Shift+Alt+P (press all these keys at once), or you can select from
the menu Insert > Character > Page Number. Even if you might have pages
with more than one digit, you only need one of these characters. You
should see a specific number show up in the frame, which is the page
number you were working on before you shifted to Edit Master Page mode.

If you've placed your frame exactly in the center, you may want to
center the text in the frame with Text Properties. Now click outside the
frame and click it once to select it, so that you can edit the typeface
and its size for your page number as desired -- this can be the same or
different from the font you're using in the document otherwise.

Now click the button on the screen that says End Edit, and you return to
the regular editing mode. What you will notice now is that even though
you can still see the frame and the page number, you can't select it,
and therefore you can't edit it, unless you go back to Master Page
editing. If you were doing this on a multiple page document, you should
be able to see that the page number changes as you go through the pages
onscreen.

Let's just stop at this point, and I'll wait for your feedback that
you've done this successfully.
*****************************
 Hi Greg,

It worked! Thanks!

One thing surprised me: I tried it several times and sometimes the page
numbers didn't change as I went on through the pages. I can't find out
why this happened sometimes and sometimes not (than they changed).
*****************************
Hi Herry,

About the only thing that makes sense is that you put a regular number
in the page number frame. One way to check this is, when you are in the
Edit Master Page mode, to select the frame, then Story Editor, where you
should see a red # instead of the actual number.

For the next step, let's go to more advanced Master Page creation
application. Start with a blank document, about 8 pages or so, and
select Facing Pages instead of Single Page, and make the first page a
Right page. Also, under the Margin Guides tab, let's pick a Preset
Layout of Golden Mean, so that we set up margins

Now select Edit > Master Pages, and you will notice that for the
defaults we now have 2 Master Pages, Normal Left and Normal Right.
Select Normal Right if it isn't already. Put your page number frame at
the bottom of the page, at about the middle point between the left and
right margins. Enter the Page Number character, End Edit.

Here's a quick way to put that frame in the middle: Place your frame at
the bottom of the page, and don't spend much time trying to center it
according to the margins. Now, from the menu, select Windows > Align and
Distribute. Select the Align tab, and then from the drop-down Relative
To: list choose Margins. Now click the middle icon in the top row
(tooltip says "Center on vertical axis") and your frame will be exactly
centered between the right and left margins.

Presuming your frame is still selected, copy it by selecting Edit > Copy
from the menu. Next, switch to the Normal Left Master Page in the Manage
Master Pages dialog. Select Edit > Paste from the menu, and your copied
frame will be pasted on the Left Master Page. Of course, it will not be
correctly aligned to the margins, but you know how to fix this with the
Align and Distribute dialog. Now End Edit.

I noticed a curious thing with this process. The Normal Right Master
Page showed 2 in the frame and Normal Left showed 1. I think this is
because Normal Left was first in the list and Right was second. When I
ended Master Page editing, then the actual pages showed correct page
numbers.

Now, let's imagine that the first page of our document is a title page,
and the second page is blank, so neither of these should be numbered,
and so the 3rd page of our document will be the first one numbered and
we want to show a 1 in our frame. To fix this, select File > Document
Settings from the menu.

The Document Settings dialog comes up, where we want to select Sections
from the list on the left. We don't need to add any sections, just edit
the one present, named 0. In the From column, change the value to 3;
this is where page numbering will start. To should show the last page
number of the document and since we want numbering to continue to the
last page, we leave that alone. The other column to not change is Start.
This tells Scribus what number to start with. In this case, we will
leave this at 1, so the 3rd page will be labeled 1. You might just click
the button for Styles to see the various labeling schemes which are options.
Now click OK, and you should see that in document pages 1 and two the
page numbering frame is empty, and on page 3 the numbering begins with 1.

So now you should know how to number pages for documents with Right and
Left Pages, and how to manipulate the numbering scheme.

I can't speak for others, but to me it would seem most likely that
people generally create their document and its content first, then after
the document is completed, work on the Master Pages and page numbering,
since the content will determine a number of things such as where
numbering begins and so on.

Greg