The lowly page number | Hacker News Reader

The lowly page number

theoutline.com

51 pointshobble25 comments

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.

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?...

The Logan's Run novel is similar, with the chapters counting down from ten to zero.

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... :-)

Another practical aspect of 4/17 is that a person printing them out can tell if they've got them all (pages go astray).

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 <evil laughs>

This also helps the speaker know whether to speed up or slow down to fill their time.

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.

Yes, exactly. Who cares that page numbers might canonically be for one paper size and not correspond to page sizes on some device? You can scroll or whatever and still use the canonical page numbers.

What's wrong with paragraph numbers? They are more precise.

Porque no los dos?

Since ebook readers can reflow text (after f.e. changing font size), page numbers lose most of their meaning.

Not so. Page breaks can still be rendered or marked anyways, and so can page numbers. And yeah, you're not going to see a whole "page" in one screenful, but so what?

Sometimes I want to put a page number on my web apps so I can easily get the answer to “where in the app are you talking about?”

It’s surprising how much work goes into figuring that out / people are terrible about explaining that.

Meta: The flashy gifs and squiggly lines on that page make it hard to read / are distracting.

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.

Maybe pdf numbers are sightly annoying in the modern age of writing.

A well-prepared PDF can include metadata about each page, so that reader software will be able to display the "logical" page number in addition to the actual numerical index. E.g. a page in the prologue of a book might show up as "xvii (19 of 150)".

This is important because if you want to print a subset of pages, you have to specific the actual numerical page numbers in the print dialog, which may not be the same as the page number on the page.

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?

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com