The Portable Document Format (PDF) was invented in the 1990s by Adobe Systems as a means to share electronic documents that could be viewed and printed on any operating system. Documents from many formats can be converted to PDF, while retaining the information and format of the original file. PDFs also feature the ability to add password protection, to comment and to enable accessibility.
With Adobe Acrobat, you can add page numbers to PDF documents with headers or footers. You can also customize how the page number looks and choose the pages on which the page numbers appear.
Step 1
Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat, click "Document," choose "Header and Footer" and select "Add." The "Add Header and Footer" dialog box appears.
Step 2
Select the font you want to use from the "Font" dropdown box and select the font size from the "Size" dropdown box.
Step 3
Click the "Underline" button to underline the page number.
Step 4
Click the "Color" button and select a predefined color (or create a custom color) for the page number.
Step 5
Type or select the margin, in inches, for the header or footer in the "Top," "Bottom," "Left" and "Right" combo boxes.
Step 6
Click "Appearance Options" and select "Shrink documents to avoid overwriting the document's text and graphics" to ensure headers and footers do not overlap with the document text. Choose "Keep position and size of header/footer text constant when printing on different page sizes" to prevent headers and footers from moving or being resized when a PDF is enlarged. Click "OK."
Step 7
Click in the header or footer text box where you want the page number to appear and click "Insert Page Number."
Step 8
Click "Page Number and Date Format." From the "Page Number Format" dropdown box, select how you want the page number to appear. In the "Start Page Number" combo box, select or type the number that begins the page numbering. Click "OK."
Step 9
Click "Page Range Options" and select whether you want to insert the header or footer on all pages or a range of pages. Click "OK."
Step 10
Click "Save Settings," type a name for your settings and click "OK" to save these settings, which you can select and apply for other PDFs.
Step 11
Click "OK" to add the header or footer to the document.