frontmatter, backmatter, appendices etc.

[Omikhleia]

As the title says ;-) We'd need these at some point.

• titlepage (internal title page recto, legalese on verso, etc.)
• frontmatter (usually with roman folios, no chapter numbering by default, etc.)
• (mainmatter)
• backmatter and appendices etc. with specific rules too..

EDIT. (Sept. 5, 2023) "title page" is a slightly different topic obeying different rules, to split from front/back matters (which are actual content).

[ul]

As a both SILE and resilient.sile newbie, how would one go for manually doing frontmatter in a book made as a .silm master + Djot chapters before proper handling is implemented?

[Omikhleia]

As a both SILE and resilient.sile newbie, how would one go for manually doing frontmatter in a book made as a .silm master + Djot chapters before proper handling is implemented?

On one hand, one can include a SIL or Lua file (or a Djot file with a raw code block switching to either SIL or Lua) and do low-level things there -- that's a cool thing regarding SILE, any behavior can be overridden on the fly.

This being said, the low-level calls are not obvious, esp. if your are new to both systems... And would end up to be similar to the things we need to do anyway eventually.

More importantly, the semantics of these "segments" are not that clear...

• frontmatter
  • no chapter numbering by default
  • usually with roman folios (but not always)
  • parts not accepted? (LaTeX does accept \part there, however, and numbers them by default, but it doesn't sound right? I've seen people complaining on that, but no clear definition of the expectations)
  • possibly its own page layout (a concept specific to resilient, but see below)
• mainmatter
  • chapter numbering by default
  • if frontmatter had non-arabic folios, reset page counter and switch to arabic (but do not rest it if the frontmatter was already in arabic)
  • parts are accepted
  • possibly its own page layout (ibid)
• appendix
  • But is that considered belonging to mainmatter or backmatter (?)
  • Chapters (?) with specific styling (e.g. Appendix A instead of Chapter 1)
  • What would be "parts" there? Or should it be introducing an implicit part (unnumbered?) if the book mainmatter has parts?
  • possibly its own page layout (ibid)
• backmatter
  • Chapters back to unnumbered (if we follow LaTeX here)
  • No parts there ? But what is the expectation in a book with parts? (as for frontmatter, LaTeX seems to allow parts there, but it's not very clear what the expectation would be
  • possibly its own page layout (ibid)

Regarding page layouts, one my want a given layout (say "division 9") in the frontmatter (for regular text), another in mainmatter (say "marginal" for wide margins for side annotations), etc. But maybe this is even the wrong way at looking at this and the layout should be a part-level decision (= different parts in different layouts)?

The main reason why I haven't addressed this feature yet is that the general solution and the expectations are not that clear to me to make something general enough.

[Omikhleia]

The logic above seems a good start, after all. I'll give it a shot.