Front matter numbering style

Enable Thumbnails from the Pages View menu so you can navigate. Start your document with a separate section to contain the page or pages of your Front Matter. A second section would follow this containing your document contents. Visit the second section's Document panel : Sections panel, and deselect Match previous section.

On the first page of your Front Matter section, click in the header or footer location where you want your page number inserted. and insert it. When you have done that, visit the Document panel : Section panel and

change the page numbering format to Roman. You also want to select the actual page number and change its text color to white. Give each Frontmatter type its own paragraph (same?) style for the Table of Contents.

In the second section, visit the Documents panel : Section panel. Change the style of your page number back to Arabic, and for Numbering, choose Continue from previous section.

When you are ready, position your cursor at the beginning of your Front Matter section and choose Insert menu : Table of Contents : Document. I deliberately excluded leader dots in the TOC.

For my example, my Front Matter section contained three Types using a heading paragraph style. I also used this paragraph style for my second sections heading:

Table of Contents (now actual page i of Front Matter section)

Front Matter (no visible Roman page number)

Document section (Arabic page numbers showing)

I export my Pages document to EPUB and choose Fixed with TOC and embed fonts. When opened in Apple Books, I see the Roman numerals in the TOC for page numbers representing the Front Matter; the Front Matter pages have no page number displayed, and when I get to the first page of content, I see an Arabic page 3 at the bottom right of the page.

Switching from Dark appearance mode to Light appearance mode with the EPUB still open in Apple Books does not reveal any page numbers on the Front Matter page.

Now, I export the EPUB using Reflow with TOC and embedded fonts. Opening in Apple Books, there is no TOC with page number references, only hyperlink bookmarks for the TOC elements. The individual Front Matter pages have Arabic page numbers, as do the rest of the EPUB. This is Apple Books controlling the page numbers appearance and there is no overriding these from the Reflow option in EPUB generation or even editing the CSS styling of the EPUB.

Neither Pages nor Apple Books will give you the control over certain text appearance when the operating system appearance mode is Dark and you have white text in the Pages content — other than what I previously described.

It might be possible to edit the EPUB in a third-party tool like Sigil and change the specific CSS class text color to transparent for the specific white text content that glares back at you in Dark mode. Pages does not provide transparency for text.

"Enable Thumbnails from the Pages View menu so you can navigate. Start your document with a separate section to contain the page or pages of your Front Matter. A second section would follow this containing your document contents. Visit the second section's Document panel : Sections panel, and deselect Match previous section."

I have my Front Matter pagers, TOC (can't get Pages to label it as Table of Contents) and body of text all in one document. How do I separate the Front Matter from the rest of the document? I tried following these steps but it did not work. Thank you.

Not sure if I should make a new post but I am uploading to KDP in a 6x9 format with .75 inside, .25 outside, Georgia style font size 10 but I keep getting errors saying that parts of the font extend beyond margin.