Make PDFs Easier to Navigate by Renumbering Pages

We love Adobe Acrobat in my office. Once in a while, someone will come up with a creative way to put the program to use specific to a law practice. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve heard more than one person singing the praises of a particular feature, so I thought I’d share it with our readers. The feature is called “renumber pages” but is more accurately called, “renumber page thumbnails.”

Here’s how it works.

In lots of documents, the page numbers on the actual pages are not sequential or are in multiple formats. For example, consider a brief. The cover page doesn’t have any page number. The table of contents and table of authorities usually are numbered with small roman numerals (i, ii, iii, etc.). The argument section, then, may be the first page that uses integers (1, 2, 3, etc.), for page numbers, but it may be the 12th page of the PDF.

This can make it tricky to navigate around the PDF. If you want to look at page 4 of the brief, you might be inclined to type “4” into the page navigation toolbar. But this will take you to the fourth page of the PDF—not to page 4. What a pain!

Here’s another scenario where this feature has come in handy. Let’s say you get an appendix from which large chunks of pages have been removed as confidential. If the appendix is particularly long, and doesn’t already contain bookmarks, it can be very difficult to navigate. A reference to B2012 means that you have to scroll through the PDF to find that page because you can’t simply type 2012 into the page navigation toolbar—that wouldn’t account for those missing pages.

Here’s the solution—renumber the page thumbnails. It’s super easy to do—you can change the page numbers in the page thumbnail view, which enables you to navigate around the PDF using the same numbers that are on the actual document. Renumber page thumbnails does not affect the page numbers on the printed page.

How to Renumber Page Thumbnails

1. First, you’ll need to be in the Pages panel to view the page thumbnails. To open the Pages panel, click the Pages icon in the horizontal toolbar.

2. If the icon is not in view, you can open the Pages panel from the main menu: select View, Navigation Panels, and Pages.

3. Select the first page that you want to renumber. For this example, let’s say you want to renumber the table of contents and table of authorities to match the printed document. Select the thumbnails of those pages by left-clicking the first page of the table of contents, pressing SHIFT, and then left-clicking the last page of the table of authorities. All of the pages in between now also are selected.

4. Right click the corresponding thumbnail and select Number Pages.

5. The Page Number dialog box opens.

6. Under Pages, you can choose to change the page numbers of (a) all pages by selecting the radio button for All; (b) just the page(s) of the thumbnail(s) you selected by selecting the radio button for Selected; or (c) a range of pages by selecting the radio button for From and entering the first and last pages in the range. In our example, you’ve selected the pages you want to change, so you’ll select the radio button next to Selected.

7. Under Numbering, select Begin new section.

8. In the Style drop-down box, choose the format appropriate for your task. For our example, choose small roman numerals.

9. In the Prefix box, you can enter a letter, word, or even multiple words. For example, if you were working on the appendix example I mentioned above, you would enter “B” in this box, so your page numbers would be, “B1, B2, B3,” etc.

10. In the Start box, type the first number (or letter) you want the series to start with. In our example, you’ll enter “i" because we’re starting on the first page of the table of contents. Here’s how it would work if you were renumbering the appendix. Let’s say pages B100-150 had been omitted from the PDF. You would select page B151, renumber it with the prefix B, and enter 151 in the Start box.

11. After you’ve made all of your choices, click OK.