Setting page numbers correctly

Question

I'm preparing a paper and I created a title page, an abstract page and an acknowledgments page. Those page must not show page numbers. So I used:

\setcounter{page}{-1}

for the title page

and

\thispagestyle{empty}
\setcounter{page}{-1}

for the other page.

In this way the pages numbers aren't show. But is it right to set the same number page to -1 for all pages where I don't want show number?

Answer 1

Using \setcounter{page}{-1} in the middle of the document is likely to cause incorrect numbering of follow-up pages. Better strategies are:

• If you want no page numbers up to a certain point in the document and to start with page number 1 at this point, use \pagenumbering{gobble} immediately after \begin{document} and \cleardoublepage\pagenumbering{arabic} at the point where numbering should start.

• If you want no page numbers on certain pages although these pages should feature "internal" numbers (e.g. page 5 with text, then a page without displayed number, then page 7 with text), you should either issue \thispagestyle{empty} at the particular pages or (if those pages are empty save for headers/footers) load the emptypage package. (For pages where new chapters start, many document classes provide automatic ways to change the page style to empty.)