%pagecount% and background pages

[ElectronTank]

Previous raised in #4628 [%pagecount% and background pages] and closed without reason.

As an engineer we use drawio a lot of internal and client facing drawings and it is very painful that we either have to (a) hardcode the page numbers or (b) accept the incorrect %pagecount% in our title block due to the use of the extremely useful Background feature of sheets.

This was previously discussed in #3378

Originally posted by jwilliams-shadowsoft February 22, 2023 I love the fact that drawio now has background pages. I'm an engineer, and when I make technical drawings for my customers the pagination is always of the form:

Page %pagenumber% of %pagecount%

However, if I use both background pages and %pagecount% the background page gets counted in the number of pages. This is expected because a background page is no different from a regular page.

I don't see how this behavior could easily be changed with the current data schema within drawio. Does anyone have any ideas about ways that I could cheat? Like defining some sort of custom property that has the value %pagecount% - 1? It's okay if it's a little hackey.

in the same thread an great idea of having a page property available for 'background' would be a great solution.
#3378 (comment)

It seems to me that being a background page is an attribute of the page, and that we should be able to mark a page as a background. Then, the logic for %pagecount% could be altered to ignore those background pages.