How to add page numbers to Postscript/PDF

Question

If you\'ve got a large document (500 pages+) in Postscript and want to add page numbers, does anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

I wrote the following shell script to solve this for LaTeX beamer style slides produced with inkscape (I pdftk cat the slides together into the final presentation PDF & then add slide numbers using the script below):

#!/bin/sh

# create working directory
tmpdir=$(mktemp --directory)

# read un-numbered beamer slides PDF from STDIN & create temporary copy
cat > $tmpdir/input.pdf

# get total number of pages
pagenum=$(pdftk $tmpdir/input.pdf dump_data | awk '/NumberOfPages/{print $NF}')

# generate latex beamer document with the desired number of empty but numbered slides
printf '%s' '
\documentclass{beamer}
\usenavigationsymbolstemplate{}
\setbeamertemplate{footline}[frame number]
\usepackage{forloop}
\begin{document}
 \newcounter{thepage}
  \forloop{thepage}{0}{\value{thepage} < '$pagenum'}{
    \begin{frame}
    \end{frame}
  }
\end{document}
' > $tmpdir/numbers.tex

# compile latex file into PDF (2nd run needed for total number of pages) & redirect output to STDERR
pdflatex -output-directory=$tmpdir numbers.tex >&2 && pdflatex -output-directory=$tmpdir numbers.tex >&2

# add empty numbered PDF slides as background to (transparent background) input slides (page by
# page) & write results to STDOUT
pdftk $tmpdir/input.pdf multibackground $tmpdir/numbers.pdf output -

# remove temporary working directory with all intermediate files
rm -r $tmpdir >&2

The script reads STDIN & writes STDOUT printing diagnostic pdflatex output to STDERR.

So just copy-paste the above code in a text file, say enumerate_slides.sh, make it executable (chmod +x enumerate_slides.sh) & call it like this:

./enumerate_slides.sh < input.pdf > output.pdf [2>/dev/null]

It should be easy to adjust this to any other kind of document by adjusting the LaTeX template to use the proper documentclass, paper size & style options.

edit: I replaced echo by $(which echo) since in ubuntu symlinks /bin/sh to dash which overrides the echo command by a shell internal interpreting escape sequences by default & not providing the -E option to override this behaviour. Note that alternatively you could escape all \ in the LaTeX template as \\.

edit: I replaced $(which echo) by printf '%s' since in zsh, which echo returns echo: shell built-in command instead of /bin/echo. See this question for details why I decided to use printf in the end.