Page numbers in a PDF are off, how can I change them?

Question

I have a digital edition of textbook I bought. The pages are numbered from 1 - 570.

As a result, when I search page 68, it shows page 51 as the first pages originally in the textbook aren't numbered and there's a whole index of some numbered as XVII.

What can I do to edit this textbook, or change the page numbers accordingly?

Solution 1

If you have Adobe Acrobat, this is really simple:

1. Open the document,
2. Select the thumbnails that you want to renumber (the first x pages)
3. Right-click, number pages (or Advanced-> Document Processing-> Number Pages
4. Adjust these settings, and click 'ok'

That should shift your start page, and add in you roman numeral pages.

Solution 2

You could always put the numbered content pages in a separate document where the page numbers matched. Then place any "un-numbered" pages in reference documents. So if the table of contents is in the first 17 pages place it in a T.O.C. document. Then have a content document where page 1 is the first page, then an index document where you could look up page numbers and find them correctly in the content. Splitting and merging PDF files is quite easy with PDF Split and Merge (imagine that)

Solution 3

Download (free) Pdf Architect, go to https://editor.cutepdf.com/edit.asp and put in the amout of pages that your reader is off in the beginning of the document. Do it so that your pages now have the right numbers. Let's say that my first page is page 13. I put in 12 blank pages at the beginning of the document.

Download your file now with the extra pages in the beginning of your document. Open the document in adobe reader. Press print. Select the pdf-Creator printer and select to print page from the first real page (that is not the extra blank page that you have put in). In my document that would be from page 13.

Now you press print and Pdf Architect will pop up, and you can save it. When you then open the saved file you will see, that the first page has another number, in my case 13, next page 14 and so on.

Solution 4

That's probably not a mistake.

The forward and introduction and "about this book" sections are not considered part of the content and so have a different page numbering system.

This is a problem in digital editions because when you tell Acrobat to go to a page, it goes to the actual page, not the numbered page. This accounts for you entering 68 and it taking you to the page numbered 51. I think you'll find there are 17 pages of preliminaries with a different numbering system.

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Comments

[slhck]

Of course it's not a mistake – the OP already acknowledged that the introduction is numbered differently. You've basically described their problem :)

[sarvesh.lad]

yes i know that... but during lecture when the proff says on page 65 ... he may say something a bit and return course and m still looking for the real page and bam i miss what he told and what he said after words and i lost link of whats going

[sarvesh.lad]

i use foxit is it possible in it?

[Ravindra Bawane]

What app do you use to read/view the docs?

[Ravindra Bawane]

Ok. Adobe reader has the capability to update the pages so that it'll reflect correctly based on the document structure. The other readers don't, so far as I know. See the answer by hephaestus above for how to do this in Adobe.

[Ravindra Bawane]

Hmmm, looking at Reader 9.5 I don't see it either. Because you're actually modifying the structure of the document according to Adobe, this is probably going to be limited to Standard/Pro versions and not available in Reader.

[hephaestus]

Foxit only reads PDFs, AFAIK, so I don't think this can be done with that application.

[Ravindra Bawane]

Hey, that works.

[Jeel Shah]

That's a pretty good idea.