Page numbers with section names

[TomGerritzen]

I like the way I can restart page numbering with each new section. However, that would be much more useful if I'd be able to "add" the section name or marker to the page number. For example: <<section name>>-<<page number>> would give a numbering scheme like A-1 to A-8 and B-1 to B-15 et cetera. I can of course manually add the prefix "A-" and "B-" in my footer text with the page numbers, but then the table of contents doesn't reflect those "engineered numbers". Manually adding the prefixes to the table of contents can be done, but is a very theoretical option because they disappear with every refresh. In a publication with a few hundred pages and several dozen sections where each section starts with page 1 I will probably never be able to find the right page 17.

This is probably why InDesign offers combining page numbers with section markers with its Numbering & Section Options dialog:

[walt.farrell]

The section name is available from the Fields panel and you can insert it before the page number if you want to.

[TomGerritzen]

@walt.farrell I know I can in plain text, but I would like to do it like in InDesign, or possibly here as well:

[walt.farrell]

Sorry; I misunderstood what you want to accomplish. That would be useful, but it does not seem to be available yet.

[TomGerritzen]

@walt.farrell No need! I should have been clearer. And I will:

I have a series of documents labelled with Roman numerals: I, II, III and IV. Each document contains a number of sections labelled with capital letters starting with A (which is a marker or name of the section). Every section has at least 2 pages, but some much more. Within each section page numbering starts with 1.

In these documents I want to number the pages accordingly:

<<Document number>><<dash>><<Section marker>><<dash>><<Page number>>.

This way a randomly chosen page will be labelled II-C-4. This is the second document, third section, page 4.

In each document I add a table of contents that should contain those page labels (for lack of a better word). It would be okay to see the part "II-C-" as a compound section marker that is prefixed to the actual page number. That way I eliminate the need for the document label.

The first half of a simple solution would be to add "II-C-" to the footer text to make the page number on each page look okay. To make the table of contents reflect those labelsI need the following second half of the solution:

In the Table of Contents tab is a box where I can insert characters between headings and page numbers. If I could add the section name (compounded to "II-C-") after the tab character it would be fine.

And then there is a third half: the page numbers that are actually in a resulting PDF... but I can live without those.