Add Page Numbers

How to add page numbers to a PDF

1. 1

   Choose a PDF

   Drop or choose one PDF file.

2. 2

   Set up the numbers

   Pick All pages or Selected pages, a number style, a position and a starting number. Check the preview.

3. 3

   Add and download

   Press Add page numbers, rename the file if you like, then download it or open it in a new tab.

Settings

• Which pages. Choose All pages, or Selected pages and type pages such as 1, 3-5, 8. The syntax is the same as in Split PDF. A page listed twice is numbered once.
• Number style. Choose “1”, “Page 1” or “Page 1 of N”. You can add a prefix and a suffix of up to 40 characters each. For example, the prefix “Section A-” gives “Section A-1”.
• Starting number. A whole number from 1 to 100,000. It starts at 1.
• Font size and color. Size runs from 6 to 72 pt and starts at 11 pt. Pick any text color; the default is black.

How numbering works

Selected pages are numbered one after another, in the original document order, starting from the starting number. Pages you did not select are left unchanged.

• Selected pages. Select pages 3-5 with a starting number of 1 and they show 1, 2 and 3. The numbers count the pages you selected, not their position in the document.
• Page 1 of N. N is the last number printed, not the document’s page count. Starting at 1 across three pages gives “Page 1 of 3” to “Page 3 of 3”. Starting at 5 across three pages gives “Page 5 of 7”.

Position and fit

Choose top left, top center, top right, bottom left, bottom center or bottom right. The default is bottom center. Placement follows each page as you see it: page rotation and the visible page area (crop box) are taken into account.

• Margin. The distance from the page edges, in points (72 pt = 1 inch). It runs from 0 to 144 pt and starts at 24 pt. On very small pages the margin is reduced.
• Labels that do not fit. Alignment uses the measured width of each final label. If a label does not fit between the margins, because of a long prefix or suffix or a large font, it is drawn smaller on those pages and the tool lists which pages. Text always stays inside the page.

Font and supported characters

Numbers use the PDF’s built-in Helvetica. It covers Western European characters only (roughly Latin-1): letters with accents such as é, ü and ñ, and common punctuation and €. Other characters in a prefix or suffix, such as Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, emoji or ✓, are refused with a message naming them. They are never silently replaced.

What is kept and what may be lost

Numbers are drawn over the page content. Nothing is covered or blanked out, so they can overlap existing content such as a footer. Check the preview before you save. The original file is never changed.

• Preview. The preview uses the same placement calculation as the saved PDF. The on-screen font is a close match for Helvetica.
• Out of date results. If you change a setting after adding numbers, the result is marked “Out of date”. Add the numbers again to get a new file. Renaming the file does not make it out of date.
• Not included. Custom fonts, Roman numerals, editing the PDF’s page labels (the numbers a viewer shows in its page box), headers and footers, and several documents at once are not part of this release.

Limits

per PDF

100 MB

pages per PDF

2,000

characters of prefix or suffix

40

highest starting number

100,000

You can number one PDF at a time. These are application limits. Devices with little memory, especially phones, may struggle with very long documents.