Add page numbers to a PDF

Skipping the front matter is the whole job

Almost nobody wants page one numbered. A cover and a contents page usually come first, and numbering should start on the page after them — often at 1 again, sometimes at 3.

So there are two separate controls here: how many pages to leave unnumbered, and what number to start counting from. Most free tools offer one or the other, which means you get numbering that starts in the right place with the wrong number, or the reverse.

Nothing is embedded

The numbers are drawn in Helvetica, which is one of the fourteen faces every PDF reader is required to have built in. That means no font is embedded and the file grows by a few hundred bytes rather than a few hundred kilobytes.

The limitation is that the standard fourteen cover Latin text only. Numbering in Devanagari or Arabic-Indic digits would need a real font file embedded, which this does not do.

It is a stamp, not a header

The number is drawn onto the page content. It is not a header field that a reader recompiles, because PDF has no such concept — what looks like a running header in any document is drawn text at a fixed position.

Practically that means adding numbers twice stamps twice. If you need to change them, go back to the original file rather than renumbering a numbered one.

The fourteen fonts that need no embedding

Every conforming PDF reader is required to have fourteen typefaces available without them being embedded: four weights each of Helvetica, Times and Courier, plus Symbol and ZapfDingbats. They are called the standard fourteen and they date from the origins of the format in PostScript.

Using one costs a few hundred bytes of font dictionary rather than the hundred kilobytes or more a subset embedded face would take. For page numbers — a handful of digits per page — that ratio is absurd enough to settle the question.

The catch is that the standard fourteen cover Latin script and little else. Numbering in Devanagari, Arabic-Indic or CJK digits genuinely needs a font embedded, and any tool offering it either embeds one or is quietly substituting something.

Answers

Can I start numbering on page 3?

Yes. Set "skip the first" to 2 and the first two pages are left alone.

Can the number start at something other than 1?

Yes, that is a separate control, so you can skip two pages and still start at 1 — or at 15.

Will the font look different?

No. It uses Helvetica, which every reader has built in, so nothing is embedded and nothing substitutes.