Print Settings in Deckle

Control the print-specific details that make a paperback feel professionally typeset (margins, running headers, page numbers, and clean text flow), all applied to your PDF export.

What You Can Do

• Fine-tune top, bottom, inner (spine), and outer margins individually, with a warning if your inner margin is too tight for your page count.
• Turn on bleed for full-bleed images or design elements that need to run to the edge of the page.
• Add a running header with several built-in content patterns (book title, chapter title, author name) or fully custom text for the left and right pages.
• Choose where page numbers sit: outside edge, center, or inside edge (spine side).
• Number your front matter in lowercase roman numerals and restart at arabic 1 where the story actually begins, the way trade books do.
• Start every chapter on a right-hand page, with the blank filler page handled for you.
• Turn on widow and orphan control so a paragraph never ends with just one line stranded at the top or bottom of a page.

How to Change Print Settings

1. Open Styles (the Styles button in the toolbar, or Ctrl/Cmd+T) and select the Print & layout category.
2. Under Margins, adjust top/bottom/inner/outer as needed. Inner and outer are already set from your trim size, but can be overridden here.
3. Under Pagination, choose whether chapters start on a right-hand page and whether page numbering restarts at Chapter One.
4. Under Running header, turn it on and choose a content pattern, or set custom text.
5. Under Footer, turn on page numbers and choose their position.
6. Under Text flow, turn on widow and orphan control if you want it.

These are project settings inside the Styles panel, not application preferences, so they travel with the book rather than with your copy of Deckle.

Margins Are Derived From Trim Size, But Overridable

Your inner, outer, top, and bottom margins are already set to values matched to your trim size (from the Typography category). Print settings let you override any of them individually if you have a reason to. If your inner margin gets too tight for your page count, Deckle warns you before it becomes a real binding problem.

How Page Numbering Works in Your PDF

Deckle numbers a print book the way traditional publishing does: front matter in lowercase roman numerals (i, ii, iii), then the count restarting at arabic 1 when the body of the book begins. That behavior is controlled by a single toggle, Restart page numbering at Chapter One, under Pagination in the Print & layout category. It is on by default.

Everything else described below is a fixed typographic convention rather than a setting, so there is nothing extra to configure.

What the toggle changes

Leave it on and your front matter runs in roman numerals, then the page counter resets to 1 and switches to arabic at the first chapter following your last front-matter document. Anchoring the reset to the end of the front matter (rather than to whichever chapter simply sits highest in the binder) is what keeps a Prologue placed above your Copyright or Table of Contents pages from ending the roman run early. If a chapter-type document is sitting above front matter, Deckle raises an export warning naming that document, since it will be numbered as front matter.

Turning the toggle on also switches Start chapters on right-hand page on and locks it there, because a restarted count only stays in step with the book's real left/right pages if every chapter opens on a recto.

Turn the toggle off and you get simple continuous arabic numbering from the very first page instead.

Pages that are counted but print no number

Some pages are part of the count yet never show a folio, which is standard trade-book design rather than a bug:

• Title page, copyright page, dedication, and epigraph. These are display pages: they hold their place in the count, but a printed number on them looks amateurish, so none appears. Part divider pages and full-bleed image pages are treated the same way.
• The very first physical page of the book. The opening leaf is counted and never numbered.
• Every section opener. The first page of each chapter carries its chapter title, not a folio, so a chapter's first visible page number lands on its second page. The same applies to back-matter openers such as Acknowledgments, About the Author, and a Glossary, and to the first page of a Foreword or Preface.
• A blank filler page. When a page is left blank purely to push the next chapter onto a right-hand page, it carries neither a running header nor a number.

Pages that do print roman numerals

With the restart turned on, your Table of Contents prints its roman folio on every page, and a Foreword or Preface prints roman numerals on its continuation pages (just not on its own opening page, exactly like a chapter). Continuation pages of front-matter sections also pick up your normal running header, and where that header is set to show a chapter title, a Foreword shows its own name rather than a chapter's.

Back matter keeps counting

Back matter does not restart or revert to roman. It simply continues the arabic sequence from wherever your last chapter ended, so an Acknowledgments page after page 312 begins at 313. Whether a document counts as front matter, body, or back matter follows from its document type, which is also what drives the specialized layouts on your special pages.

If you would rather have no page numbers anywhere, turn Show page numbers off under Footer. That removes folios from the whole book, roman and arabic alike.

A Couple of Things Worth Knowing

💡 Running header content patterns are built around verso/recto conventions (left-hand vs. right-hand pages), e.g. book title on the left page, chapter title on the right, matching traditional print book layout rather than showing the same text on every page by default.

💡 Widow and orphan control has an adjustable minimum line count (2-4 lines). The higher you set it, the more aggressively Deckle avoids leaving a short line stranded alone.

💡 Bleed only matters if you have full-bleed images or design elements. Most text-only novels don't need it turned on.

💡 Roman-to-arabic numbering is a PDF-only concept. EPUB is reflowable and has no fixed pages to number, so the pagination settings simply don't apply to it.