Ok, so for the original print composer (and now styler), it was possible to use the formatcompletehook to run a format pass and get the ordinal page count of a formatted document.
I now need to push that capability to the end users who are using PE only (not styler). The hook doesn't work, and I can't use the format command for PE users. Anyone have any experience getting this to work? I need to be able to pass a composer parameter value for printRange in a call to compose_for_pdf, but can't set a range without with page count (tried just a large ambiguous number for the end range, no luck).