Pfthb

How do you achieve roman numerals for things like preface, acknowledgement etc and restart Arabic numbering at 1 for first page of chapter one in R Bookdown.

I am wanting to render to pdf in bookdown, but have not found any good information on how to change page numbering like this

thanks

Please also look at the answer by @maxheld. It is simpler and for many use cases sufficient.

PDF output is produced with LaTeX using the book document class. In this class, you can use frontmatter, mainmatter and backmatter to separate different 'parts' of the book. In order to use this with bookdown I did the following:

• start with a copy of https://github.com/seankross/bookdown-start
  


• copy <R-library-path>/rmarkdown/rmd/latex/default-1.17.0.2.tex as book.tex to the working directory


• update book.tex to include frontmatter, mainmatter and backmatter (diff below)


• update _output.yml to refer to book.tex as template (diff below)

With these changes the PDF produced with bookdown used (loweercase) roman numerals for the ToC and restarted with arabic numbers for the actual body. Here the diff:

 diff --git a/_output.yml b/_output.yml
index 112cf5b..b211ba7 100644
--- a/_output.yml
+++ b/_output.yml
@@ -13,5 +13,6 @@ bookdown::pdf_book:
 in_header: preamble.tex
 latex_engine: xelatex
 citation_package: natbib
+ template: book.tex
 bookdown::epub_book:
 stylesheet: style.css
diff --git a/book.tex b/book.tex
index 0f9979d..3d03540 100644
--- a/book.tex
+++ b/book.tex
@@ -235,6 +235,9 @@ $header-includes$
 $endfor$

 begindocument
+$if(book-class)$
+frontmatter
+$endif$
 $if(title)$
 maketitle
 $endif$
@@ -263,8 +266,14 @@ $endif$
 $if(lof)$
 listoffigures
 $endif$
+$if(book-class)$
+mainmatter
+$endif$
 $body$

+$if(book-class)$
+backmatter
+$endif$
 $if(natbib)$
 $if(bibliography)$
 $if(biblio-title)$

I think it might be easier to just follow the example @yihui used in his own bookdown krantz example:

Add the following files, perhaps in a /latex subfolder:

• 
  preamble.tex with the latex frontmatter command at the end,


• 
  after_body.tex with the latex backmatter command,

Then, before your first actual main body, just add the mainmatter command (just in latex) to, say, your index.Rmd (whichever of your *.Rmds is first, conventionally index.Rmd).

Then, to amend your _output.yml like so:

bookdown::pdf_book:
 includes:
 in_header: latex/preamble.tex
 after_body: latex/after_body.tex 

This intersperses the correct frontmatter, mainmatter and backmatter commands into your pandoc-ed latex book. It will be respected by most style files to make sure that arabic numbering only begins inside the main matter.

This is also documented in the publishing chapter of the bookdown book.

It's actually very simple:

In the front matter part do this:

cleardoublepage
pagenumberingroman

In the main matter part:

cleardoublepage
pagenumberingarabic