Anne, Doug,

Thank you both for your helpful replies.

I had hoped there was a checkbox to click somewhere that would allow me to
use hidden text, and spare you the boring details. I am sure you will have a
more elegant solution for this simple problem than the one I came up with.

I am working with a template which has several sections in the front matter,
numbered continuously with roman numerals. The body of the document has  
"Page x of x" arabic numbering which restarts at page one. Therein lies the
rub, since the total number of pages needs to exclude the front matter.

A fairly straighforward solution was to place a {PAGE} field alongside of a
stable feature of the last page of the front matter, bookmark it (lets call
it frontpages), and then use the bookmark in a simple formula to get the
desired total :  
{ = {NUMPAGES } - frontpages }.

This works perfectly well, but hiding the bookmarked field is apparently not
an option. I'd swear I have previously used hidden text without this problem,
which is why I was looking for help in that direction.

As it happens, the spot deemed least likely to be disturbed by users of the
template where the bookmark could be secreted is in a heading. I had tried
using white text, which is fairly unobtrusive on the page, but is
unacceptably visible in the TOC...

Looking forward, with much appreciation,  to your thoughts on the matter.

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