@CarLaTeX -- ronald searle once drew a cartoon of a (very fluffy!) white persian cat sitting inside the closed door of a clothes dryer. it was in a whole book of cat cartoons, all delightful, but that was certainly the most memorable.
But anyway, to your question, three cents: (1) you never change the numbering style but continue the counter; you can omit the numbers in exceptional cases (title, half-title, colophon, dedication, empty pages, full-page figures). (2) you number each page exactly once, including the cover (title) page, with the exception of half-title which is again page 1.
@Johannes_B -- i don't think i've ever seen that kind of continuation of the page numbering (with the next number after the last frontmatter number). i have seen restarting with 1, sometimes with a prefix like "A-1" for appendix A.
@barbarabeeton I've already seen such requests, unfortunately. Also numbering chapters with Roman numbers in the front matter and the back matter (with continuation) pops up from time to time.
@barbarabeeton It's absurd, but so many thesis regulations are ridiculous.
@egreg -- well, i deal mostly with requests already vetted by the ams production editors. and i'm 99+% certain that they would refuse such a request from an author, since ams has an established style. (glad i don't have to deal with flaky thesis rules; when i wrote my master's thesis, the only real rule was to use special paper with a preprinted red margin, double-space the text, and don't go outside the margins. and thankfully, by then they accepted photocopies so i could avoid carbons.)
Well, I tend to recommend roman for frontmatter and a restart at 1 starting from mainmatter going through the rest of the project. Depending on whether or nor hyperref is used we might even use a third (Roman) numbering for hidden page numbers related to the title page.
@daleif well, the only thing that tends to have a hidden page number, is the coverpage, which (1) is usually typeset separately and (2) if not, you can set it to page -1 as it's never getting its page number printed...
@yo' since memoir restets the page number after the titlingpage env, it is often just easier to use \pagenumbering{Roman} before the title page, then frontmatter and mainmatter
@DavidCarlisle @JosephWright I also get an error from bblopts.cfg: It is actually (in my system) an empty local file (to avoid that in miktex bblopts.cfg from the arabi package is loaded). Could latexbug test if a file is empty and then refrain from complaining?
@UlrikeFischer better would be if the aribi package was fixed not to distribute globally acting config files (That came up before not so long ago I think)
@DavidCarlisle I will consider this in the future -- you know why. :) I am quite reluctant on using terminals to display fancy stuffl. I had a similar problem with arara and one localisation, I think it was Russian...
@DavidCarlisle starred, thanks.
@DavidCarlisle: also, there's that plan of yours: make everybody speak English. :)
Good evening, is there by any chance a native English speaker present? I am unsure with this expression "scientists with various backgrounds" or "from various backgrounds". Could you clearify this for me please? Sorry if this is too offtopic.
@Gudrun Don't worry about the "off-topic"... we speak of everything here! Unfortunately, I'm not English, but do you know there are also: english.stackexchange.com and ell.stackexchange.com?
@JosephWright okay thank you and it does not matter with what verb I use this expression please? For example: I have worked with persons from various backgrounds. I managed persons from various backgrounds.
