UK TeX FAQ -- question label pdfpagelabels

### Hyperref and repeated page numbers

The book class (and its friends and relations) automatically changes the display of page numbers in the frontmatter of the document to lower-case roman. This is fine for human readers, but it confuses hyperref since there are pages which seem (to hyperref) to have the same page number. Fortunately, there are configuration options to make hyperref “do the right thing”.

The two options in question are:

`plainpages=false`
  Make page anchors using the formatted form of the page number. With this option, hyperref writes different anchors for pages ‘ii’ and ‘2’. (If the option is set ‘`true`’ — the default — hyperref writes page anchors as the arabic form of the absolute page number, rather than the formatted form.)
`pdfpagelabels`
  Set PDF page labels; i.e., write the value of `\``thepage` to the PDF file so that Acrobat Reader can display the page number as (say) ‘ii (4 of 40)’ rather than simply ‘4 of 40’.

The two should be used whenever page numbering is not just ‘1`..`n’; they may be used independently, but usually are not.

The recipe isn’t perfect: it relies on `\``thepage` being different for every page in the document. A common problem arises when there is an unnumbered title page, after which page numbers are reset: the PDFTeX warning of “duplicate destinations” will happen in this case, regardless of the options.

`hyperref.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/hyperref (or browse the directory)

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=pdfpagelabels