Add headers and footers to a PDF

A running header or footer is how a printed document tells you where you are in it. Page three of twelve, the matter name, the draft date, the words that stop a loose page being filed in the wrong bundle. FileGizmo adds them to a PDF in your browser: write the lines, choose which pages get them, and download the result. The file is never uploaded, there is no account, and nothing is kept.

Tokens are filled in per page

A header that says the same thing on every page can be typed once. A footer that says “Page 3 of 12” cannot, because the number changes and the total does not. So three tokens are replaced as each page is stamped.

{page} becomes that page’s own number. {pages} becomes the number of pages in the document. {date} becomes today’s date, formatted for your locale rather than in whatever format the tool’s author happened to prefer — the substitution is worked out on your machine, in your browser, using your own settings.

Write “Page {page} of {pages}” and you get exactly that, page by page. Anything you write that is not a token is left alone, so a footer reading “Smith v Jones — {date}” comes out with the matter name intact.

Header, footer, or both

Either line can be left blank. A document that needs only a confidentiality notice at the top gets a header and nothing else; a document that needs only pagination gets a footer. Both lines share one alignment and one text size, because a header and a footer set to different sizes read as a mistake rather than a choice.

Alignment is left, centre, or right. Centre is the default and is what most page furniture uses. The lines sit at a fixed inset from the top and bottom edges, chosen to clear the margins of an ordinary A4 or Letter page.

What it does to the document

The lines are drawn as vector text onto each selected page. The document is not rasterized, so existing text stays selectable and searchable, images are not re-encoded, and the file does not grow noticeably. Pages carrying a rotation are stamped in the orientation a reader sees them, not the orientation the page box is stored in — on a page rotated ninety degrees the top of the page as read is not the top of its box, and text placed by arithmetic alone ends up down the side.

Applying to a page range numbers only those pages but still counts {pages} against the whole document, because that is what a reader expects: page 3 of 12 means the third page of a twelve-page document, not the third of the five pages you happened to stamp.

Check the result

Download it and look. A header sits at a fixed distance from the edge, and a document whose own content runs close to that edge — a letterhead, a wide table, a full-bleed image — can end up with the new line overlapping something. Nothing here is destructive: the original file on your disk is untouched, and you can change the wording, the alignment or the size and apply it again.

If the document already has page numbers of its own, adding a footer will give it two. That is worth checking before a document goes out, and it is the single most common thing to get wrong with a tool like this.