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

Oh, it's a long time since I used postscript, but a quick dip into the blue book will tell you :) www-cdf.fnal.gov/offline/PostScript/BLUEBOOK.PDF

On the other hand, Adobe Acrobat and a bit of javascript would also do wonders ;)

Alternatively, I did find this: http://www.ghostscript.com/pipermail/gs-devel/2005-May/006956.html, which seems to fit the bill (I didn't try it)

Answer 2

I tried pspdftool (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pspdftool).

I eventually got it to work, but at first I got this error:

pspdftool: xreftable read error

The source file was created with pdfjoin from pdfjam, and contained a bunch of scans from my Epson Workforce as well as generated tag pages. I couldn't figure out a way to fix the xref table, so I converted to ps with pdf2ps and back to pdf with pdf2ps. Then I could use this to get nice page numbers on the bottom right corner:

pspdftool 'number(start=1, size=20, x=550 pt, y=10 pt)' input.pdf output.pdf

Unfortunately, it means that any text-searchable pages are no longer searchable because the text was rasterized in the ps conversion. Fortunately, in my case it doesn't matter.

Is there any way to fix or empty the xref table of a pdf file without losing what pages are searchable?