Page numbering for slides interspersed with notes

[Dubious Dude]

I'm making a slide presentation with a right master page for the
slide, and a left master page for the speaker notes. It would be nice
not to have to be able to keep this format rather than splitting the
notes and slides into separate documents.

I would like the slides to have page numbering at the bottom.
Currently, they occupy odd pages, whereas the notes occupy the even
pages. This means that the slides increase in page numbering in steps
of 2. This detracts from the professionalism of the presentation.

Some ways I can think of to get around this is toe use paragraph
numbering. For example, all slide titles will have paragraph format
"Slide Title", while note page titles will have paragraph format "Note
Title". I can then find a way to get the paragraph number for each
page onto the footer as a fake page number (I have yet to do this, so
I'm just painting a picture of possible approaches, to be confirmed
by doing). If I don't want the numbering to show up in the actual
title for the slide or note page, I can define a white colored
character format to be used for the numbering. However, I'm often
tight for horizontal space in the titles, so an alternative is to
precede each page title be dummy paragraph of format "Slide Page
Number" or "Note page Number", which will reside above the page title,
and be invisibly white.

All these acrobatics seem like a rather round-about way to get
alternating page numbering for slides and notes. Is there a simpler
way to do this, without resorting to dummy paragraph numbering? If
so, what about the situation where a few slides might be followed by
more than a single page of notes? For example, out of a presentation
of 15 slides, say they are each followed by one page of notes except
slides 5 and 9, which are followed by 2 and 3 pages of notes
respectively.

I'm using Framemaker 6 on Window 2000. Thanks for any suggestions.

P.S.:
Posted to the adobe.framemaker forum at adobeforums.com
and usenet newsgroups adobe.framemaker & comp.text.frame.

[Dubious Dude]

Here's a summary of this thread over in the adobeforums.com server.

One approach would be to create a document with large landscape
pages, where each page contains two text frames, representing one
note "page" and one slide "page". You would then be able to use the
normal page numbering and only have it on the slide "pages".
I guess this would place the note page before (to the left of) the
slide page, or you would have to accept a blank note page before the
first slide page.
To solve multiple note pages for a single slide is trickier.
Thanks. I use to do something similar to your suggestion I use to
have a Portrait page with the slide on the top half and the notes on
the bottom half. It makes a great handout, but is also a bit tricky
during the presentation, though. For example, if I did /not/ have
slides & notes on the same physical page, I can generate a PDF that
is easily navigated during the presentation. I can press Ctrl-L in
Acrobat Reader and the physical page fills the whole screen. If
notes were on the same physical page, it would require diddling
around with sizing to got only the slide portion on visible.
Advancing pages is also easier with one logical page per physical
page. I can click the mouse, press <Space>, or <PgDn> to advance to
the next slide (which fills the whole screen). In cases where the
same page contains the notes, I (and others) often have to drag the
page around to center the slide portion on the screen. If the notes
were on a separate succeeding page, it's just a matter of 2 clicks
to skip over the notes (which you generally don't want to draw
attention to on the projection screen). In fact if every slide is
on an odd page, I can print out only the odd pages for overhead
viewing. Or I can make the pages for notes conditionally hidden to
eliminate those pages altogether.
For the case where notes and slides are on the same page, I realize
that if you size things just right, and set Acrobat Reader to view a
Single Page at a time rather than Continuous (the latter meaning
that the screen can straddle 2 pages), you can page down twice to
skip the Notes part, but this delicate sizing is easily changed by
accident. It is trivial to put it back into the right sizing and
positioning, but during a presentation, seconds count. That's why I
was hoping to find something a bit more robust.
One imperfect solution is to conditionally hide all notes pages and
print out the slides pages single-sidedly. For rehearsual, hide all
slides pages and print notes out on the other side. This provides a
good set of notes to speak from, where notes & slides are numbered
in a matching fashion. However, you have to be careful about how
the printer paper is fed to avoid having the notes for the last
slide appearing on the back of the first slide. Another caveat is
that when you print out the handouts (neither slides nor notes are
hidden), the page numbering doesn't match the slides to be viewed
via the projector, since projected slides don't have page numbers
the increment by 2.
A lot of imperfect work arounds. I'm not up the creek if I don't
find a better solution, but it is something I've wrestled with for
years, and the use of invisible paragraphs numbers was just dreamt
up today. It's kind of fragile though. If you accidentally erase
the dummy paragraph above the slide title, all the page numbers are
off kilter.
Actually, there is possibly a way around the fragility of using a
dummy paragraph above the slide/notes title to increment the slide
page counter. I'll have paragraph number X.Y, where each slide
title increments X, and each note page title increment Y. X.Y can
then appear in the running footer for both slide & notes pages. The
numbering in the page title can be made invisible by defining a
white colored character format. Furthermore, it can be made to
occupy neglegible horizontal space in the title by making the
character format of a small font. Even more furthermore, there are
spread/stretch specs than can be experimented with to squish every
last drop of space out of the invisible X.Y.
And the cherry to top it off? The slide title paragraph format can
be made to start at the top of the right page always. This makes it
so that no matter how many not pages there are for the last slide,
the next slide always starts on the proper page, even if a blank
page is needed. So if use psnup to squeeze 2, 3, or 4 slides onto a
physical page, the associated notes pages will always be paired up
with the proper slide.
Anyway, time to quit chatting and make it so....
OK, the solution works fine. I have the slide title paragraph
format "SlideTitle" with numbering "S:<n+>< =0>", and a notes title
paragraph format "NotesTitle" with numbering "S:Notes <n>.<n+>".
The font for the numbering is 2-point (minimum), white, and 10%
stretch (minimum) so that it is not visible and occupies neglegible
horizontal space in the title line. Both right and left master
pages use the same running header & footer because if there are more
1 page of notes for a slide, the 2nd page of notes will fall on an
odd page (normally occupied by slides).
There is only one way that I hope to improve this. Before this
little experiment, the notes title for a slide entitled "Starting
slide" would be "Notes: Starting Slide". To automatically start
each notes title with "Notes:", it was embedded into the paragraph
number. This can no longer be done, since the paragraph number has
been rendered invisible by the font settings mentioned above.
Again, this is necessary because the paragraph number now serves as
a counter for the page number. It's no big deal to manually type in
"Notes:" at the start of each notes title, but it is easy to forget
and there are enough formatting details to worry about when
composing presentation slides. As I mentioned previously, the
problem is easily circumvented with a dummy paragraph preceding each
note title, but hopefully it is not necessary to use dummy
paragraphs, since they are easily erased in the thick of things.