Force page numbering on every page

Question

I have a LaTeX report with title, abstract and the main part. I want to have numbers on every single page starting from the first. How do I do that? The way it is now is that the first page is not numbered and there is a numbering before the abstract which starts from 1 after the abstract.

Answer 1

LaTeX knows three basic page styles

• empty
• plain
• headings

empty is what it says, an empty page. commonly used on titlepages plain is what is used on chapter start pages headings is all other pages.

The pages are internally actually counted throughout the document. So even if a page has pagestyle empty, the counter goes up, the page number is just not displayed.

You mentioned that you are using the an abstract and I assume you are using an abstract-environment for this. Following the definition of the abstract in report.cls one finds that it uses the same as the titlepage and that the page number is hidden and reset after the abstract with

 \thispagestyle{empty}%
  \setcounter{page}\z@

An easy way to get around this is to redefine the environment

\documentclass{report}

\usepackage{lipsum}

\makeatletter
\renewenvironment{titlepage}
    {%
      \if@twocolumn
        \@restonecoltrue\onecolumn
      \else
        \@restonecolfalse\newpage
      \fi
     % \thispagestyle{empty}% remove the empty page style
      %\setcounter{page}\z@ %remove the counter reset
    }%
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\begin{titlepage}
 A title
\end{titlepage}


\begin{abstract}

 bla
\end{abstract}

\chapter{first}
\lipsum
\chapter{second}
\lipsum
\section{subsecond}
\lipsum

\end{document}

This gives you a document where the titlepage has page 1 (also shown on the paper) and the counter isn't reset anymore

Answer 2

You don't mention which page numbering style you want to see applied to pages that don't show page numbers so far, so I'll assume you want the "plain" page style (showing the page number centered in the footer line) for those pages.

You could add the following code to your document, not in the preamble but immediately after the \maketitle instruction (or, alternatively, at the start of the first page following the titlepage environment):

\makeatletter
\let\ps@oldempty\ps@empty % save default definition of \ps@empty
\renewcommand\ps@empty\ps@plain
\makeatother