Hyperref and repeated page numbers

The book class (and its friends and relations) automatically changes the display of page numbers in the frontmatter of the document to lower-case roman. This is fine for human readers, but it confuses hyperref since there are pages which seem (to hyperref) to have the same page number. Fortunately, there are configuration options to make hyperref „do the right thing“.

The two options in question are:

plainpages=false

Make page anchors using the formatted form of the page number. With this option, hyperref writes different anchors for pages 'ii' and '2'. (If the option is set 'true' - the default - hyperref writes page anchors as the arabic form of the absolute page number, rather than the formatted form.)

pdfpagelabels

Set PDF page labels; i.e., write the value of \thepage to the PDF file so that Acrobat Reader can display the page number as (say) 'ii(4 of 40)' rather than simply '4 of 40'.

The two should be used whenever page numbering is not just '1..n'; they may be used independently, but usually are not.