### Page numbering

It doesn't matter if your book content has introduction pages or not, it is normal to also count the cover pages 1 + 2 when numbering the book content pages. Therefore the book content starts with page number 3 at the earliest.

Please do so. – What? You don't know how? Well, you should become familiar with the Page inspector by and by. You will find the menu item Edit Page Numbering in the action menu of the Page inspector. One click and you will see the following dialog:

Please set the Starts with value to 3. Done that? But you will not see any effect from it. The page symbols in the Page inspector still show the physical page numbers (and for good reason).

To create page numbers automatically and make them visible, let's switch our view. Yes, that's right, the view. You have edited the document in layout page view until now.

Just click the tiny menu button in the upper left corner of the document window. Choose the Master Page View.

The document window will then no longer show the book content, but an empty master page named Default master page. (Feel free to rename it to something like Pagination or similar later.)

The document grid is visible here also. Create two new text frames and place them exactly one grid row below the type area of your book.

Now create new text rulers in the Text Ruler inspector, using the same parameters as shown in the following pictures. Assign these rulers appropriately to the two text frames.

Hint: You can easily assign text rulers to empty text frames by double-clicking on the text frame. When the text ruler becomes visible, click on its name. You will then see a menu where you can select the wanted text ruler.

Please enter an empty line in the left text frame (press [Return] once), and then insert the text field Page Number. To do this, you have to [Control]-click into the text frame, and choose the sub menu item Insert Page Number from Insert Text Field in the context menu. Repeat these steps for the right text frame.

After that, the two text frames should look like this:

Just take a closer look at what you have done here:

You will see the placeholder text ###. Surprised? If you expected to see a page number now, say number 3, we will just have to talk about text fields. A text field is a placeholder for other text. When you insert a text field for page numbers in a text frame, this text field will not be replaced by the real page number in master pages, but only in layout pages. You will soon see how this works.

Please switch your document view back to layout page view now.

Surprise! All layout pages of your book will now show the correct page numbers in the correct positions. Notice the shown page number 36 and the real page number 34 in the previous picture. It's perfect, isn't it? (It was you who defined a short while ago in the Page inspector that the page numbering should start with 3.)

If you switch the frame guides and document grid invisible now (in the View menu), the book almost looks like it is printed, doesn't it?