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The lowly page number

theoutline.com

11–20 of 27 posts

Re: The lowly page number

#11
post #3

A professor of mine insisted that presentations have not only page numbers, but also the total number of pages (like this: 4/17), so that he knew how much longer he'd have to listen to this... :-)

I do this for business presentations, but especially at conferences to give attendees hope. It includes a progress bar.

Please tell me you also do the classic Microsoft progress bar... 0/100 50/100 95/100 97/100 98/100 99/100 99.5/100

Re: The lowly page number

#12

Page numbers are slightly annoying in the modern age of PDFs: there's the visual / physical / internal document (?) page number of what the document would have if printed out, and then there's the page number of the file. Never quite sure what reference.

This really is annoying. Maybe the solution is a smarter PDF reader that can detect the printed page numbers and use that for its own numbering?

Re: The lowly page number

#13
Chuck Palahniuk's novel Survivor inverts the role of the page number, turning it into a countdown toward the climax. From Wikipedia:

> The chapters and pages are numbered backwards in the book, beginning with Chapter 47 on page 289 and ending with page 1 of Chapter 1.

This omnipresent clock ended up being a clever, subtle way to continually build tension for the reader.

Re: The lowly page number

#14
post #13

Chuck Palahniuk's novel Survivor inverts the role of the page number, turning it into a countdown toward the climax. From Wikipedia: > The chapters and pages are numbered backwards in the book, beginning with Chapter 47 on page 289 and ending with page 1 of Chapter 1. This omnipresent clock ended up being a clever, subtle way to continually build tension for the reader.

That's so cool. Well clocks counting down are sometimes more useful than clocks counting up. In fact where did I read that NASA's countdowns were til ten but then to build up suspense for television, they counted ten down to zero.

And in fact that was better, with computers that's often better. So literature and cinema, the concept of suspense, actually improved science AND made good television at the same time.

For boxing they should count down from ten to zero, in fact.

Re: The lowly page number

#15
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this for business presentations, but especially at conferences to give attendees hope. It includes a progress bar.

Please tell me you also do the classic Microsoft progress bar... 0/100 50/100 95/100 97/100 98/100 99/100 99.5/100

Windows progress bars can occasionally go backwards too

Re: The lowly page number

#16
post #13

Chuck Palahniuk's novel Survivor inverts the role of the page number, turning it into a countdown toward the climax. From Wikipedia: > The chapters and pages are numbered backwards in the book, beginning with Chapter 47 on page 289 and ending with page 1 of Chapter 1. This omnipresent clock ended up being a clever, subtle way to continually build tension for the reader.

The author of the non-fiction 'Humble Pi' wanted to incorporate some clever page numbering (such as backwards, binary, overflow errors), but was advised against it by the publisher who thought it might cause readers to think there is a publishing error. Eventually they compromised by having a warning page (which IMO kills the joke).

https://twitter.com/standupmaths/status/1218311775868899329?...

Re: The lowly page number

#17

Page numbers are slightly annoying in the modern age of PDFs: there's the visual / physical / internal document (?) page number of what the document would have if printed out, and then there's the page number of the file. Never quite sure what reference.

Especially once the PDFs inevitably include scans of Something Else, or are constituted from multiple concatenated already-paginated extant documents.

Re: The lowly page number

#18
For more reading about page numbers, the earlier chapters of _Index, A History of the_ explain the transition from scrolls to codices and how the latter form enabled a specific topical index.

Re: The lowly page number

#20

Page numbering is dying. Ebook readers often don't show any page numbers. IETF RFCs are losing their page numbers. I don't like it.

It's very irritating because it's the only way to refer to part of a long section. I'm going to have to start referring to paragraph numbers. Ugh.
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