Numbers written into the page, not on top of it
A document that came out of several sources rarely arrives numbered. You merged three exports, you scanned a stack of paper, and now the reader has no way to say which sheet they are looking at. This tool walks the whole PDF once and stamps a number on every page: grey Helvetica, 11pt, roughly 10 mm from the edge you picked.
The number is drawn into the page content stream, so it behaves like the rest of the document. It prints, it survives flattening, and it does not disappear when someone strips comments or annotations. Sideways pages are handled too: the stamp follows the page rotation flag, which means a landscape scan gets its number along the edge that reads as the bottom rather than sliding into a margin.
Choosing the position and the first number
- Six positions. Bottom centre, bottom right, bottom left, top centre, top right and top left.
- Start at 1. The default, for a document that stands on its own.
- Start at 0. Useful when the first sheet is a cover and should not count.
- Start at any number. Set 5 or 40 to continue the numbering of a document that comes before this one.
Get the document in order first, then number it. Use Merge PDF to join the parts, Rotate PDF to straighten scans, and Crop PDF if wide margins are pushing the number away from the text.