Using ifthen to hide page number on certain pages with a page numbering style such as roman

Question

In my document, I want to hide certain things from the headers/footers using ifthen (rather than defining new page styles). For example, I'd like to hide the page number on the first few pages:

\cfoot{\ifthenelse{\thepage<11}{}{\thepage}}

This will hide the page number in pages which are smaller than 11 (so, pages 1 to 10), and show the page number if the page number is 11 or above, in the center footer.

However, this seems to only work if the page numbering is arabic. Say I wanted to change the page numbering of the first five pages to roman. Then my pages would be numbered as follows:

i, ii, iii, iv, v, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ...

This would mess up my ifthen conditional, because, for example, for the first page, the expression in \cfoot would evaluate to the following:

\ifthenelse{i<11}{}{\thepage}

and i<11 doesn't make sense.

My question now is, is there perhaps a better counter to use, rather than \thepage, which can be a non-numeric value if the page numbering is roman?

Answer 1

Rather use \value{page} than \thepage, in order to perform a numerical test on the value of the page counter, not on its output definition (which would fail in certain cases anyway).

In my opinion, there's no need to use \ifthenelse. The TeX primitive \ifnum is sufficient here.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{fancyhdr}

\usepackage{blindtext}
\def\pagethreshold{10}

\fancypagestyle{plain}{%
  \renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
  \fancyhf{}
   \cfoot{%
   \ifnum\pagethreshold<\value{page}
     \arabic{page}% or \thepage
    \else
    % Do something else
   \fi
 }
}

\pagestyle{plain}

\begin{document}
\blindtext[100]
\end{document}

Update for possible \pagenumbering usage

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{fancyhdr}

\usepackage{blindtext}


\newif\ifshowpagenumbers
\showpagenumbersfalse% Don't show them
\def\pagetreshold{10}

\fancypagestyle{plain}{%
  \renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
  \fancyhf{}
  \cfoot{%
    \ifshowpagenumbers
    \thepage
    \else
    \ifnum\pagetreshold<\value{page}
    \arabic{page}% or \thepage
    \else
    %
    \fi
    \fi
  }
}

\pagestyle{plain}

\begin{document}
\pagenumbering{roman}
\blindtext[50]
\clearpage
\showpagenumberstrue% Show them!
\pagenumbering{arabic}
\blindtext[50]

\end{document}