Setting unorthodox page numbers for changed parts of large documents

Question

My requirement is printing a cookbook consisting of a set of recipes. However, there will be frequent updates of recipes and inserts of new ones. Therefore I need a solution to prevent re-printing the whole book, when only parts of it changed.

My solution draft is to handle it like some law book publishers do. They provide the book with a binding that can be opened to remove or add single pages. This way I only need to print the changed pages as well as the index.

My problem are page numbers. I search for a solution to keep page numbers steady for the inserted part and postfix them there, e.g., 21a, 21b. Is there any possibility to do that? I'm completely out of ideas where even to start searching for such a solution.

(By the way: I am not fixed on my solution above. If anyone has a better idea to handle frequently changing large documents for print, I'd be glad to hear it.)

Answer 1

As you don't want to change the page numbers, I suggest making the page numbers depend upon the recipes. For example, the pages of the Carrot cake recipe could be numbered CC1, CC2, and so on -- although most recipes would probably fit on one page? You could make the "page number prefix" depend on the recipe, like this, or instead assign it in some sensible way.

The pages in the book would appear in lexicographic order, making it easy to insert new pages and finding the page that you were after.

Here is one way to implement this idea:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{xparse}
\usepackage{blindtext}

\let\realchapter\chapter% save the definition of \chapter for later use
\def\pageprefix{}% prefix for page numbers
\renewcommand\thepage{\pageprefix\arabic{page}}

%\chapter<page prefix>[short title]{title}
\RenewDocumentCommand\chapter{ r<> o m }{%
    \IfNoValueTF{#2}{\realchapter{#3}}%   without short title
                  {\realchapter[#2]{#3}}% with    short title
    \def\pageprefix{#1}\setcounter{page}{1}% reset page counter
}

\begin{document}

    \chapter<Pan>{Pancakes}
    \Blindtext

    \chapter<Om>{Omelettes}
    \Blindtext

    \chapter<CC>{Carrot cake}
    \Blindtext

\end{document}

So the \chapter command now has a mandatory argument that sets the page prefix. The syntax is:

\chapter<page prefix>[short title]{title}

As is the case with the \chapter command, the short title is optional and can be omitted.

Another variation on this idea would be to label the pages as aaa, aab, aac, ..., bba, bbb, bbc,... Again, this would be easy to do using the code above, by replacing the re-definition of \thepage by

\renewcommand\thepage{\pageprefix\alph{page}}

Answer 2

To change the numbers in a range you might do the following (I don't guarantee that this would not break things):

EDIT: I made the environment nestable. Also I changed the page numbers from \alph to \roman to allow more than 26 subpages.

\documentclass[]{article}

\usepackage{blindtext}

\makeatletter
\newcount\@subpagescount%
\newenvironment{subpages}{%
    \edef\@subpagesprefix{\thepage}%
    \@subpagescount=\c@page%
    \clearpage%
    \edef\thepage{\@subpagesprefix.\noexpand\roman{page}}%
    \setcounter{page}{1}%
}{\clearpage\setcounter{page}{\numexpr\@subpagescount+1}}
\makeatother

\begin{document}
\setcounter{page}{21}
\blindtext

\begin{subpages}
    First page in not nested \texttt{subpages}
    \clearpage
    Second page in not nested \texttt{subpages}
    \begin{subpages}
        \setcounter{page}{26}
        First page in nested \texttt{subpages}
        \clearpage
        Second page in nested \texttt{subpages}
    \end{subpages}
    After the nested \texttt{subpages}
\end{subpages}

\blindtext
\end{document}