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Add Page Numbers to PDF

Pick a corner, a format and where the count starts, and see it on the page before you download. Runs entirely in your browser.

Add page numbers

Numbers are drawn onto the pages with a standard font, so the rest of the document is left exactly as it was.

Two settings, because they answer different questions

Almost every real numbering job has front matter. A report opens with a cover and a contents page; a submission bundle starts with a letter; a thesis has a title page, an abstract and an acknowledgements section before anything a reader would call page one. So “which pages get a number” and “what that number says” come apart immediately, and a tool that offers only one control forces you to choose which of the two to get wrong.

Here they are separate. The page range decides which sheets are touched at all, and the starting number decides what the first of them says. Leave the cover out and start at 1, and the body is numbered the way a printed book is. Number everything but start at 0, and the cover carries a 0 you can ignore. Start at 47 to continue a document you numbered earlier.

Rotated pages are where these tools usually fail

A page in a PDF has its own rotation value, separate from its content: 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees, applied by the viewer before it draws anything. Scanners set it constantly, and so does any report with a landscape table dropped into a portrait document.

The naive implementation writes the number at fixed coordinates in the page’s own space and calls it done. On a page that displays turned, that puts your carefully chosen “bottom centre” number somewhere along the left edge, rotated ninety degrees, reading upwards. This maps the position you picked onto the page as it is displayed, and turns the text to match, so a mixed-orientation document ends up with numbers in one consistent place.

Why the file barely grows

PDF defines fourteen standard fonts that every conforming reader already has, Helvetica among them. Referring to one costs a name in the document rather than an embedded typeface, so numbering a three-hundred-page document adds a few hundred bytes in total. Nothing else in the file is rewritten: the existing text stays selectable and searchable, vector artwork stays vector, and images keep the exact bytes they arrived with.

Add Page Numbers FAQ

Is my PDF uploaded to add the numbers?

No. The page is rendered for the preview and the numbers are drawn into the document entirely by code running on your own device. The documents people number are usually the ones they care about — a thesis, a contract bundle, a court exhibit — and none of it leaves your machine here.

Can I leave the cover page unnumbered?

Yes, and it is the most common thing people want. Set the first page to 2 and start the count at 1: the cover stays clean and the page after it is numbered 1. The two settings are separate on purpose, because 'which pages get a number' and 'what that number says' are genuinely different questions.

What does the N in '1 of N' count?

The last number this run will print, not the document's page count. If you skip a cover page in a ten-page document, the body reads '1 of 9' through '9 of 9'. Counting the cover would print 'of 10' on a document where no page is ever numbered 10, which is exactly the sort of small wrongness a reader notices.

Will the numbers land correctly on rotated pages?

Yes. A PDF page can carry a rotation of 90, 180 or 270 degrees that tells the viewer to turn it before displaying it. Choosing 'bottom right' means the bottom right of the page as you see it, so on a rotated page the number is placed and turned to match. A tool that ignores this puts the number on what looks like the side of the page, sideways.

Does numbering change anything else in the file?

Only the added text. The numbers use one of the fourteen fonts every PDF reader already has, so no font data is embedded and the file grows by a few hundred bytes rather than a few hundred kilobytes. Existing text stays selectable, images keep their original bytes, and nothing is re-compressed.