[Tex/LaTex] Offset in page numbers in pdf viewer due to roman numbering of frontmatter makes printing difficult

page-numberingpdftexprintingviewers

My PDF document generated with LaTeX has roman numbering for the frontmatter.

My problem is: if I want to print a certain range of pages, it is very difficult to select them, because my PDF Viewer (Skim.app or Preview.app in MacOS X 10.6.8) seems to count the pages from the beginning of the PDF (1 = first page of PDF), but it displays the correct page numbers of the document (so page 1 is the first page of the mainmatter).

Is there a way to solve this so that the page numbers displayed are the same like those I have to enter in the printing dialog?

Here is a simple example:

\documentclass{scrbook}

\usepackage{hyperref}

\begin{document}

\frontmatter

\section{Here starts the Frontmatter}
text frontmatter

\mainmatter

\section{here starts the mainmatter}

text mainmatter: in my PDF viewer this is page 1, but when I would like to print it, I'd have to print page 3 (selecting page 1 in the print dialog would print page i, the first page of the PDF)

\backmatter

\section{here comes the backmatter}
text backmatter

\end{document}

Best Answer

Thanks to the comments of Qrrbrbirlbel Torbjørn T. and I found the solution myself:

Skim.app (version 1.3.22) indeed displays both page numbers (example for first page of MWE):

enter image description here

  • it shows page "i" in the white box on the left
  • and it shows page "1 of 5" (the "real" page, starting by 1 for the first page) in the title bar of the window

Preview.app (version 5.0.1.) only displays the "real" page number (first page of PDF = 1) in the title bar

So in both applications if I choose the "real" page number from the title bar in the printing dialog, I can precisely select the page range to print.

Related Question