Add Page Numbers

Add Page Numbers draws one line of text onto each page you select, using pdf-lib and one of the standard PDF fonts. Your document is opened and saved back rather than rebuilt from copied pages, so the outline, interactive form fields and the title and author entries come through unchanged, and the modification date is left alone. The number is real text in the page's content stream, so it can be selected, searched and copied like any other word on the page.

The format field decides what is printed. Five presets cover the usual shapes — 1, Page 1, 1 / 10, Page 1 of 10, and - 1 - — and Custom accepts any wording you like around the tokens {n}, {total}, {date}, {time} and {filename}, so “Appendix B, sheet {n}” is as valid as a bare digit. Two things about {total} are worth knowing before you use it: it resolves to the last number in the sequence you asked for rather than to the document's page count, and the counter advances once per stamped page rather than once per sheet — number pages odd-only in a ten-page file and they read 1 to 5, not 1, 3, 5, 7, 9.

Placement is described rather than dragged. Six positions cover the bottom and the top of the page at left, centre and right, and the distance in from the edge is typed in millimetres. The maths is done in the orientation the page displays at, so a sheet flagged 90, 180 or 270 degrees is numbered where a reader will look for it, upright, rather than at the matching corner of the unrotated coordinates. Eight standard PDF fonts are offered from 4 to 72 pt with a colour picker, and the run covers whichever pages you name: all, a block written 2-5, an open 7- for everything from page seven onward, or a mixed list such as 1,4-6,last. The words odd and even must stand alone, though — mixing one into a list, as in 1,odd, is refused.

pdf-lib does the writing here in the page, and the PDF is never handed to a server. Four limits are worth reading first. Nothing on the page is detected, so numbers already printed into a sheet stay exactly where they are and the new one is drawn over whatever occupies that corner, with no white box behind it; the margin is also measured from the file's media box rather than any crop box, so a page cropped down for print can carry its number closer to the visible edge than the setting suggests. Only decimal numerals are produced; there are no Roman numerals and no letter sequences. The standard fonts are encoded as WinAnsi, so Chinese, Greek, Cyrillic and emoji cannot be drawn and are replaced by a question mark, counted in the run summary. And a batch is a set of separate jobs, so every file restarts at your first number — Bates Numbering is the tool that carries one counter across a document set.

Runs on your device. Your file is processed directly in this browser.