recto
Recto (from Latin rectus "upright, straight, right") describes the front of a sheet of paper , papyrus , parchment , a painting or a bank note . The opposite of recto is on verso , indicative of the reverse. Originally, recto was used in papyrology to refer to the inside of the papyrus roll, which is mostly written on alone and on which the individual papyrus strips are parallel to the lines of writing and the roll length. In archiving and manuscript studies, it is not the pages but the pages of unpaginated documents that are counted and the front and back are designated as "recto" and "verso" ( foliation ). The abbreviation is done by a subsequent, sometimes superscript "r" without a space. Page 5 of the book would be paginated at an unnumbered (or leaf, by numbered) point folio (fol.) 3r or 3 r .