[Tex/LaTex] Cover pages with the Memoir Class

coversmemoir

For a book I'm writing, I want to have a cover, as distinct from the title page. It's unclear what the best way to go about doing this is. There are several packages I've seen referenced specifically for typesetting covers, however I'd like to avoid these options for the reason that using a different/separate class would require me to include the cover with something like pdfpages which would seriously complicate compilation of the final document.

So with that in mind, here are the two major problems I have:

Setting the page "number" of the cover page:

One can override the page number for any particular page in the PDF output with the following line:

\renewcommand\thepage{cover} % sets the page 'number' to "cover"

However, subsequent pages will still be numbered for instance, ii instead of i. I could probably hack around with the page number counter, but I'm curious if there's a "correct" way to do this without mucking about with the internals of the class.

Preserve correct recto/verso alternation

Since the cover isn't a real page, it's neither recto nor verso. However, inserting a cover page messes up the alternation.

Best Answer

Setting the page number

In general, yo can use \setcounter{page}{1} to restart the numeration in the actual page, but if you use \frontmatter and \mainmatter commands you do not need that (see example). In the cover page, therefore, is enough a \thispagestyle{empty}

Preserve correct recto/verso alternation

The above mentioned commands, take care to left blank pages to start each part in recto pages. Note that also happen with \chapter{} using the twoside options unless you add also openany. 

\documentclass[extrafontsizes,twoside]{memoir}
\usepackage[showframe]{geometry}
\begin{document}
\newgeometry{lmargin=1cm,rmargin=1cm} % 
\vspace*{.1\textheight}
{\centering\bfseries\fontsize{120}{130}\selectfont My cover\par}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\frontmatter
\newgeometry{lmargin=5cm,rmargin=2cm} % 
a\newpage 
b\newpage
\mainmatter
c\newpage
d\newpage
\end{document}

Note: I included the package geometry to show the margins and use a different layout for the the cover page, but this class have their own commands for the page layout.

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