How to add page numbers to a PDF

Court bundles, dissertations, board packets: plenty of documents need visible page numbers, and surprisingly few free tools add them without a watermark or an upload.

In FernPDF, page numbering is built into the Merge tool: drop one PDF (or several), switch on “Add page numbers”, and merge. Each page gets a tidy “3 / 24”-style stamp at the bottom center, baked into the file.

Putting numbering inside Merge rather than as its own separate tool is deliberate: the two jobs almost always happen together in practice. A dissertation is usually several chapter files before it's one numbered document; a board packet is a cover page, an agenda and a stack of appendices before it becomes one numbered pack. Doing both in one pass means the numbering is stamped after the files are already in final order, so there's no risk of numbering a document and then having to redo it because a section moved.

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