Sigil indexing - interaction with pagination

[Simons Mith]

I used to work at a book publisher. We would send the same print-ready pdfs we sent to our printers to an Indian ebook conversion company (Swift ProSys) and they did a cheap and pretty decent job of converting them to epub for us. As a side effect of this conversion, every 60 or so lines in the epub, there would be a convenient <a id="page_xx"></a> tag, which matched the physical pagination of the print edition. This was quite handy for reporting typos and things, even in the epub version.

I assume Swift ProSys' conversion tools did this automatically for them, but IDK the exact implementation details. It's been a few years now.

Now as a personal project I have a document whose prime format is epub rather than pdf - the reverse of the above arrangement, but I would still like to produce a paginated pdf and have the pdf page numbers match the 'page numbers' in the epub and/or vice versa. This is especially desirable because the epub has an index, and an index in its current form:

...
actions 1, 2
continuous 1, 2
free 1
fumble 1
...

would be pretty much useless for a hard copy printout. Ok, the clickable links do still work in a pdf, but they're not all that great, and in print they're a complete waste of time.

Unfortunately, epub has no inherent concept of page numbers.

Is there a graceful automated way to insert page numbers into an epub so that this book's index works gracefully in epub (the primary format), and also in a pdf, and also in a hard copy? Can an epub index be taught how to use page numbers in a meaningful way? Does anyone have any advice or suggestions?