Page numbering

Page numbering is the process of applying a sequence of numbers (or letters, or Roman numerals) to the pages of a book or other document. The number itself, which may appear in various places on the page, can be referred to as a page number or as a folio. Like other numbering schemes such as chapter numbering, page numbers allow the citation of a particular page of the numbered document and facilitates to the reader to find specific parts of the document and to know the size of the complete text (by checking the number of the last page).

Numbering conventions

Even numbers usually appear on verso (left-hand) pages, while odd numbers appear on recto (right-hand) pages. In the printing industry, in cases where odd numbers appear on verso pages and even numbers on recto pages, this is referred to as non-traditional folios (in the past, it had been referred to as Chinese folios, however this term has fallen out of favor in recent years).

In books, some pages, known as blind folios, of the front matter and back matter are numbered but the numbers are not printed. Publishers are not consistent about how they number the pages of their books. Some publishers stick with the default numbering of the tool they are using, which is typically to number the first page of the front matter as 1 and all pages after that in a consecutive order. When publishers wish to distinguish between the front matter and the body, the initial title pages are blind folios, the front matter is numbered using lower-case Roman numerals (i, ii, iii...) and the first page of the body or main content begins with 1. The title page of the body, if present, is a blind folio; similarly, any section title pages (e.g., when the body is broken into multiple parts), are blind folios.