Page numbers in a PDF are off, how can I change them?

Question

I have a digital edition of textbook I bought. The pages are numbered from 1 - 570.

As a result, when I search page 68, it shows page 51 as the first pages originally in the textbook aren't numbered and there's a whole index of some numbered as XVII.

What can I do to edit this textbook, or change the page numbers accordingly?

Answer 1

If you have Adobe Acrobat, this is really simple:

1. Open the document,
2. Select the thumbnails that you want to renumber (the first x pages)
3. Right-click, number pages (or Advanced-> Document Processing-> Number Pages
4. Adjust these settings, and click 'ok'

That should shift your start page, and add in you roman numeral pages.

Answer 2

That's probably not a mistake.

The forward and introduction and "about this book" sections are not considered part of the content and so have a different page numbering system.

This is a problem in digital editions because when you tell Acrobat to go to a page, it goes to the actual page, not the numbered page. This accounts for you entering 68 and it taking you to the page numbered 51. I think you'll find there are 17 pages of preliminaries with a different numbering system.

Answer 3

You could always put the numbered content pages in a separate document where the page numbers matched. Then place any "un-numbered" pages in reference documents. So if the table of contents is in the first 17 pages place it in a T.O.C. document. Then have a content document where page 1 is the first page, then an index document where you could look up page numbers and find them correctly in the content. Splitting and merging PDF files is quite easy with PDF Split and Merge (imagine that)