RE: Change starting page number...

[Oisin McGuinness <oisin@xxxxxxxx>]

 Norman Walsh asked:

>Is it possible to change the starting page number of a document? Suppose
>I want to print an article and have it start on page 305? 

As a practising pedant, I'll try to address all variations of this question I can think of...

If this means "I want the formatting application to start printing from page 305
of a very long document", then the answer is presumably to be found in the
Print Dialog of the application, and Norman presumably would not have asked this.

If this means "I'm making RTF output, and I want Word to set up the page number to begin
with 305", then there is probably some way to do this within Word; if there are no page numbers already, then
"View->Header/Footer; Insert->Page Numbers -> Format... has a "Start at" selector.
I've just tried to replace existing (DSSSL generated) page numbers with new page numbers
which start at somewhere else, and it is messy; too much hand work.

If this means "I want the starting page number on the output to be 305, where
the output is RTF, and Word will be printing, but little futzing in Word is desired", 
then I have implemented a solution as a patch to Jade. (This was needed in
the course of a conversion project from ArborText's "The Publisher" to Word; we had
many legal documents that were addenda to, or components of other documents, and which
had to preserve page numbering.) It is fairly straightforward, it is defined as an extension
(like Jade's other RTF specific extensions), which I called "page-number-start", simply
define a value when making your simple-page-sequence, and the appropriate RTF magic code
(\pgnstartsNN) is inserted in the right place. I submitted it to James Clark in October 97, who
expressed a preference for the name "first-page-number" instead, but it has not made it into Jade
yet, so presumably not many people have needed this. 

I can send the diffs to RtfFOTBuilder.cxx to anyone who wants this; I've used this on both NT and
Digital Unix, and have built it into all recent Jade versions without problems.

Oisin McGuinness
Sumitomo Bank Capital Markets
277 Park Avenue
New York NY 10172



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