Flexible Page Numbering

**mwenz** · 26 October 2017, 02:49 PM

Originally Posted by lex

Dear Gary,

I am not sure why you should not be able to use Montax for this. It supports 1UP-imposition (most other impo programs do not!) and you can reprocess the Xara PDF with different margins for left and right. The result is a normal PDF (with normal pages, crop marks and other additions are not required). I suggest you try their demo.

I use Montax Pro. Great application and I highly recommend it for people needing to do imposition. And it would work for setting different margins, I suppose. But I've never tried it.

It doesn't in any way resolve other issues that master pages or layout applications do by nature.

Ya know, QXP has moved on a bit since 1992, Lex. XDP isn't in any way as capable as Q or ID or PagePlus (which I believe Gary has) nor even Viva Designer. And it never will be that. XDP now has a (very) little bit of OT Feature support, it needs more love in this department, but even what is has needs fixed/fleshed out. I design fonts. I cannot test anything but the most simple OT Features in XDP and even those (like ligatures) can only have bog standard ways implemented in the OT Lookups.

Further, there seems to be an issue with the encoding of fonts in XDP. Now, I think this is one of the issues that have been fixed but as of yet not released.

I do books, technical manuals, catalogs, etc as a job. If I had to use XDP for these layout tasks, I think I would go insane and I know my bottom line would shrivel up.

**lex** · 27 October 2017, 05:57 AM

Originally Posted by mwenz

I do books, technical manuals, catalogs, etc as a job. If I had to use XDP for these layout tasks, I think I would go insane and I know my bottom line would shrivel up.

I know what you mean. Xara is not for intricate books. I have been in publishing for over 30 years now, and back in the days when I did print publications I used Ventura for that. I rely very much on virtualization nowdays, and I still have a working installation of Ventura 4.2 on my W2K virtual machine. Xara is a good substitute for the things I did with Quark in the 1990's like shorter pieces of a few pages.

**mwenz** · 27 October 2017, 12:14 PM

Well, I would argue it is inefficient for novels as well...

I started this madness with Xerox's Ventura Publisher (and other modules) that ran under the GEM interface in the late 1980s. Did several manuals until Xerox divested it. And I have Corel Ventura 10 installed here on a Windows 10 computer. Every once in a while I need to convert an older publication to newer software, both those I did and (often) US government publications. There is nothing today that can match some of its long-document handling features. I still dislike Corel's decision to kill it off rather than go through the work of making it compliant as regards OTF fonts, etc.

Once in a blue moon, the good ol' days were just that...

**gwpriester** · 27 October 2017, 12:52 PM

OK We have gone far off topic here (as usual).

My point is I appreciate the ability to control the start of the page numbering.

The book I am working on is a novel. I am very happy with the results and I am doing this in a program I am familiar with.

**lex** · 28 October 2017, 10:09 AM

Originally Posted by gwpriester

I am very happy with the results and I am doing this in a program I am familiar with.

Gary,

That looks fine. My point, if any, is that since Xara is apt at doing basic page content layout, one could leave it at that, and augment this layout by postprocessing the resulting PDF by other programs, adding page numbers, changing the margins and gutters, splitting a two-column spread into individual pages, etc.