How to add page numbers to a PDF
- Drop a PDF into the box above, or click it to choose one. Every page appears as a thumbnail.
- Pick where the number goes — six positions, from top left to bottom right.
- Choose the format: a plain
1,1 / 12,Page 1 of 12, or your own wording. - Check the thumbnails. The number you will get is drawn on each page, in the size, colour and corner you chose.
- Download the numbered PDF. It is rebuilt after every change, so there is no separate “apply” step.
Nothing is uploaded. The file is opened, numbered and saved by your own browser, which is why there is no page limit, no queue and no account — and why a confidential contract or a medical report never leaves your computer.
Where numbering starts — the two settings people mix up
Almost every question about page numbering is really about one of two different things, and tools that offer a single “start at” box cannot express both:
| You want… | Set | Result |
|---|---|---|
| A clean cover, numbers from the second sheet | First numbered page 2, Start numbering at 1 | Sheet 2 reads “1” |
| A cover that counts as page 1 but stays blank | First numbered page 2, Start numbering at 2 | Sheet 2 reads “2” |
| To continue a document that ended at 48 | Start numbering at 49 | First sheet reads “49” |
| Numbers on part of the file only | Pages to number 5-20 | Only those sheets carry a number |
First numbered page decides where numbers start appearing. Start numbering at decides what the first printed number says. Keeping them apart is what lets a cover page count without being marked, which is how printers, theses and most report templates expect it.
Roman numerals for the front matter, in one pass
Reports, dissertations and books number the front matter — title page, contents, preface — with i, ii, iii, and then start the body again at 1. Tick Number the front matter separately, say how many pages it covers, and both sections are numbered in a single pass: the first pages get i, ii, iii (or I, II, III, or a, b, c), and the page straight after them reads 1.
This is the part most online tools cannot do. Their advice is to number pages 1–5 in one job, download the file, upload it again and number the rest — two passes, two downloads, and a second chance to get the offset wrong. Here the counting is worked out once, and the thumbnails show both sections before anything is saved.
Rotated, cropped and scanned pages
A PDF page has a raw coordinate box and, separately, an instruction for how far to turn it when displayed, plus a crop box that can start anywhere. Tools that write straight into the raw box put the number sideways on a landscape scan, in the wrong corner of a rotated page, or outside the visible area of a cropped one.
This tool works out the position from the page as you see it, so “bottom right” means the bottom right of the sheet in your reader, the right way up, on every page — including a document that mixes portrait and landscape, or A4 pages with a scanned A5 insert. The thumbnails are rendered the same way, so what you see is what the file gets.
What the number actually is
It is real text drawn onto the page, not an image: it stays sharp at any zoom, can be selected and searched, and adds a few hundred bytes to the file rather than megabytes. Standard PDF fonts (Helvetica, Times, Courier) carry no download at all. If your format contains characters those fonts cannot draw — Turkish, Polish, Greek or Cyrillic letters, say — an embedded font is fetched just for that job, and only then.
Everything else in the document is left alone. Text, images, links, bookmarks and form fields survive unchanged, because the pages are not redrawn or re-encoded; the number is simply added on top. Your original file is never modified — the numbered version is a new download.
What it cannot do
- Remove numbers that are already printed. Once text is part of a PDF page there is no reliable way to delete it. Crop the old footer, or re-export from the source document.
- Avoid existing footers automatically. The number is drawn where you put it. If a page already has a footer there, the thumbnails will show the clash — move the position or raise the margin.
- Number a password-protected file. Protected PDFs are refused when you open them, not after you have set everything up. Remove the protection first with Unlock PDF, then number the unlocked copy.
- Insert numbers into the page structure. The label a reader shows in its page box (PDF page labels) is a separate feature; this tool prints numbers on the sheet, which is what readers and printers see.
Before and after numbering
Page numbers are usually the last step, so get the page order right first. Put files together with Merge PDF, take pages out with Delete PDF Pages, fix sideways scans with Rotate PDF — then number the result. If the numbered file is going out by email, Compress PDF shrinks it afterwards, and Add Watermark to PDF can stamp it as a draft or a copy.