How do I add line numbers to a PDF in Acrobat?

[brilbeaut]

I am working with PDFs of research journal articles, and need to annotate them by page, column and line. It's tedious counting lines, and I noticed that some PDFs already have numbers, by 5s, to the left of each column. How can add that to documents without numbering?

[Unregistered]

There is a way to add line numbers to a PDF without the need of the origial document. (i.e. an MS Word document that was saved as a PDF and you no longer have the word file) You just have to trick it! Adobe should come up with a better solution, but in the mean time, this is what worked for us...



I. Create a blank document with line numbers on the left side of the document, save it as a PDF:

There are many ways to do this, easiest is to use Excel...



1- If using standard 8X11 letter size paper; open MS Excel 2007 and run consecutive numbers 1-55, left-aligned on the left-most column.



2-Check the print preview in Excel and fix the margins manually so that the row of numbers is all the way to the left of the document



3- Fix the properties so that the spreadsheet fits in one page, check the print preview. You should see a blank page with numbers on the left side.



4- Save the document as a PDF, name it "bc", and open it, check to see that it looks right, make sure line numbers are all the way to the left.



II. Open the PDF that needs to have line numbers with ACROBAT PRO and change the background to the file you just created



1- Use Acrobat Pro to open the original PDF file you want to add line numbers to



2- Select 'DOCUMENT''>BACKGROUND>ADD/REPLACE



3-In the Add Background window, choose the "bc" file you did in step I, then click OK



And Viola!!... you now have line numbers in a PDF document that did not have any previously. Now, obviously, line numbers will not be aligned perfectly to each line in the document, but close enough to reference the line number / page in a legal document for review.



Hope that helps sobody out there, we had to go and purchase Acrobat pro just to get this done. It was an expensive lesson on learning to save the original Word file.



Cheers!

[zhze999]

Thank you! I think your suggestion is a great idea!

[Unregistered]

Of great help. Thanks

[Unregistered]

I followed the instructions listed above but used a Word document for the line numbering instead of Excel. It worked beautifully. Thanks for the tip.