When volume two must continue—not restart
Enterprises ship employee handbooks, serialized journals, and multi-part specs as separate PDFs because email gateways choke on monoliths, yet print vendors still demand one continuous pagination storyline across volumes. When volume three opens at page 412 instead of page 1, every cross-reference, index entry, and supervisor’s sticky note depends on that continuity holding true. Failure modes are mundane but costly: an accidental blank sheet after the cover counts—or doesn’t—depending on house style; parallel editors insert landscape pages that reorder signatures; appendices restart numbering because someone duplicated an old template. Ai2Done lets you declare explicit starting integers and skip rules directly in the browser, preview how footer digits map to thumbnails, and monitor progress while long jobs churn so silent stalls do not masquerade as success. After export, reconcile against the master pagination spreadsheet your editorial desk maintains—note intentional blanks and tipped-in color plates—because litigation-style hindsight later rarely forgives “almost aligned” manuals. If archival merges reunite volumes, rerun numbering holistically instead of assuming stitched files inherit truth.
Custom starts in three steps
- Capture global page ranges per volume and decide whether blank inserts count.
- Upload the PDF, assign the starting integer, and configure leading-page skips.
- Export and reconcile TOC/index anchors against the editorial spreadsheet.