Thanks for your response, Kovid (and thanks also for Calibre, which is absolutely fabulous!).
The scrolling functions do operate as you've described, so I appreciate the clarification. Unfortunately, I use Calibre on a Surface Book, and I tend to run the Viewer with the screen detached (in tablet mode, or what Microsoft calls Clipboard mode). In that case, I do not have access to the next/previous buttons. My only option is to tap the screen. You mentioned that the behaviour of tapping is configurable. Here is what I see in the dialog box:
For whatever reason, the dialog box text is not very clear, so the options are a little difficult to understand (I wonder if this is some artefact of the screen resolution?). What I found is that:
(a) the first checkbox, "Tapping on the pa..." enables or disables the page flip function. If unchecked, tapping the screen has no effect. If checked, tapping the screen flips the page, but its exact behaviour depends on the next option, "Mouse wheel f...".
(b) The second checkbox, "Mouse wheel f...", determines whether tapping the screen advances by an entire page or just one column.
So with both those options checked, I get the behaviour I desire -- all good. The difficulty was more to do with the readability of the dialog, and perhaps the wording of the second checkbox (to make it clearer that these functions affect tapping as well as scrolling with the mouse).
I haven't had to use the other options in that dialog box, but the purpose of the "Scrolling in flow mode" graphic is unclear to me. Still, you've resolved my issue, so thanks again.