Your 60-page report is ready, the client wants it tomorrow, and the page numbers are missing. Reprinting from Word would scramble the table layouts you spent two hours fixing.
Good news: you don't need to. Page numbers can be stamped onto a finished PDF in under a minute, and you can choose exactly where they sit and which pages they skip.
Open the PDF in a browser editor
Drag the file into Flint's PDF editor. The whole document loads in your browser — no install, no upload to a third party. Once it's open, you'll see a sidebar of page thumbnails on the left and an editing canvas on the right.
The advantage of editing in-place is that nothing about your original styling changes. Headings keep their fonts, images stay anchored, tables don't reflow. You're stamping content on top of the existing pages, not re-rendering them from scratch.
Place numbers where readers actually look
Bottom-centre is the safe default. Bottom-right reads as more formal and is the convention for legal and academic work. Top-right works for landscape decks.
Give the number some breathing room — a 1.5 cm margin from the page edge stops it clipping when the PDF is printed. Pick a typeface that matches your body text (Helvetica, Inter, Times) and a size around 9-10pt. Loud page numbers age badly.
Skip the pages that shouldn't be numbered
Cover pages, dividers, and back matter normally aren't numbered. In the editor, exclude pages 1-2 from the stamping range, or set the count to start from page 3 as "page 1".
If your document has a separate appendix you want numbered differently (A1, A2, A3…), apply a second numbering pass to that range only. You can also use reorder pages first if the appendix needs to move.
Save and check the print preview
Download the numbered PDF and open it in any reader. Zoom out to two-page spread view — that's where alignment problems show up immediately. If you spot a number sitting too close to a footer or running into a chart, jump back into the editor and nudge the offset.
Once it looks right, the numbers are flattened into the PDF. No one downstream can shift them, and they'll print exactly as shown on screen.
FAQ
Can I add page numbers without uploading my PDF to a server?
Yes. Flint processes the file in your browser, so the PDF stays on your machine. That matters if you're working with anything confidential — contracts, financial statements, draft strategy decks.
How do I start numbering from page 3 instead of page 1?
Set the starting page to 3 and tell the tool to treat that as "page 1" in the displayed numbering. Pages 1-2 stay blank, and the third page shows as 1.
Will adding page numbers change my existing content?
No. Page numbers are added as a new layer over the existing pages. Text, tables, and images underneath stay exactly as they were.
What font sizes work best?
9-10pt for A4 and Letter documents. Bigger for posters or slide decks. Match your body text if possible — mismatched fonts in footers look amateur.
Adding page numbers shouldn't mean re-exporting the whole document. Open your file in Flint's PDF editor, drop the numbers where you want them, and download it back — original layout intact.