Workaround: How to get page numbers in an ePub

I guess we’re all a little bit frustrated because of the ePub-development in bits and pieces. As a designer we need more control about nearly everything. But I don’t want to yammer.

I’m doing scientific books in print and in e-publishing. And one of the most important things for scientist is to reference a quote exactly and accuratly. That means they take the book, they quote and they reference to the page. But how to do this in an ePub? Since there is no concept of pages – everything is reflow able – the quality of referencing sinks.

After many hours of experimenting here is a workaround. I know, there a lot of additional problems involved with this workaround (broken cross-references and hyperlinks – are one of them) but maybe this starting point will lead for someone to further thinking.

1. Master page items will not be exported to ePub so neither page numbers will.
2. A story – even if it lives in hundreds of threated text frames – will be treated as one text. So how to get the page number in?
3. Create a text variable on the master page – referring to the paragraph stile of the regular page number. (It is also a good idea to surround the variable with [#], so it will be separated from the main text later.) Place the text frame with the variable under the main text frame. And don’t forget to create an object stile for this text frame as well.
   After that you will not see the variable on a regular page.
4. Therefore you have to override all of the master page items. You can do this for the whole document by selecting every page in the pages panel. Because of this override, it is a good idea to place potential other items on different layers, so that you can turn off these layers.
5. Now you have two text frames with the same number on your page. But even if the page number is not a master page item anymore – it will not get exported. (The frame will but without content). The text variable will get exported to ePub.
6. Now you have two choices to get this variable into the right spot.

   1. Use the build in script “SplitStory”. This will break your long story and it will remain exactly the same as in the print layout. (Therefore it would be very good to disable hyphenating at the end of a text frame while you’re setting up the print version in forehand.)
   2. You can use the new feature in CS5.5 and simply drag the frame as an anchored object after the last letter of the text frame. (But be careful this could cause problems if you later replace all of the ‘bad’ letters and characters like non-breaking spaces. This could lead to a page flow, and the anchor will flow as well and then the variable will get a wrong number – if it changes the page.)

   7. Now you can control the ‘fake’ page number with your CSS. I set the numbers in gray, a little bit smaller and assigned a left float to the containing div. (This is the reason for the object stile.)

OK, I’m aware of the briefness of this explanations but I still hope you get an idea of the trick with the text variables.

Jeldrik