Acrobat Professional Sux

May 21, 2008 3:53 AM

What's with Adobe Acrobat Professional - and not being able to put my custom page / section numbers into the header / footer? Did I miss a meeting? Why has no one else posed this question to the Googles? Is there a 3rd party plug-in that does this? Surely somebody knows something?!

...see how in this screenshot I can do customized page / section numbers

...and yet you can see here that no function exists to insert this information into the footer?! This is madness! Why don't Adobe want people to be able to do this?

...i now refer you back to my initial question; Did I miss a meeting? Is there a plug-in that does this?

posted by mjao to computers & internet (6 answers total)

I don't understand, can't you just go to Document > Header & Footer > Add
posted by lockle at 4:45 AM on May 21, 2008

I have spent nearly half an hour trying to prove you wrong, mjao, and I don't think I can. That's very strange. *favoriting in case someone solves it*

I wish I still had my old install of Acro 7 to figure out what changed. Grrr.
posted by catlet at 8:13 AM on May 21, 2008

I looked around for a while and couldn't find any way to do this automatically.

The unpleasant workaround is just to manually edit the page number field in the "add header" dialog, e.g., specify the first page range and enter 1.<<1>> then specify the second page range and enter 2.<<1>>, etc.

I've never tried to do this in earlier versions of Acrobat so I'm not sure if it's something that used to be there and now isn't but I have encountered a couple of features that were either lost in Acrobat 8 or the way to do them changed significantly, and in at least one of those cases, the documentation was not updated from Acrobat 7. In other words, I feel your pain.
posted by camcgee at 9:22 AM on May 21, 2008

Okay...without knowing your exact use case, I'll try to explain how this works. First of all, the dialog in your first screenshot is contrary to your purposes. This only affects the way Acrobat handles the document (such as when viewing page thumbnails), and has nothing to do with what is printed. So ignore that for now. That leaves the Add Header and Footer dialog, where you'll be doing all your printed numbering.

Now, from your first screenshot, all I can gather is that you want your numbering to go 5.1.1, 5.2.1, 5.3.1, etc., in a selected set. Let's just say for the hell of it that you would also like even-numbered page numbers to appear on the left side of the footer and odd numbers on the right. So in the Add Header and Footer dialog you would enter in the Left Footer Text box "5.", then hit the Insert Page Number button, and then enter ".1", so that in the box it says "5.<>>.1". Then you would click Page Range Options, select your set of pages, and choose the Subset "Even Pages Only" to only put even page numbers on the left. Then you'd click OK, open up the Add Headers and Footers dialog, click Add New to add a new set of footers, and do the same thing as above except you'd put it in the right footer and choose odd pages for your subset.

So basically, you just have to define a set of related pages by the available criteria and and add each set individually by going through the motions each time. Depending on how complex your numbering scheme is, you might have to follow the process a few times to cover all your bases.
posted by tjvis at 11:25 AM on May 21, 2008

My boyfriend (the one who asked the question) says to say to The Guy With The Long Answer: "Thanks very much for the info... I don't know why Adobe doesn't sort this out and make it automatic. It's SO dumb!"
posted by mjao at 3:43 AM on May 22, 2008

"By the way, I'm still looking for a way to do this automatically, if anyone has information. Most probably this will be done with a third party plugin."
posted by mjao at 4:19 AM on May 22, 2008