ok, on the "good news" front, it appears that rfrank has finally decided to start naming his files more wisely, so big respect to the people who steered in that direction.
How do you propose to deal with texts that have a large number of "prefix" pages numbered something like "iii" for example? How do you propose to deal with texts that have a large number of "prefix" pages which are not numbered at all? How do you propose to deal with texts where the numbering scheme was screwed up in the original text? How do you propose to deal with texts which do not count illustration pages in their numbering scheme? Etc. Again, it's great to have a simple system that works except when it doesn't work in which case it's not so simple anymore.