About the PDF Header & Footer Tool (English)
Headers and footers are the small pieces of running text that appear at the top and bottom of every page of a document — the company name across the top, the page number in the corner, the date and file name in the footer, a “Confidential” note, or a website address. They do the quiet work of making a document look finished and professional, keeping printed pages in order, and letting readers identify and cite any page. The ApneSoftware PDF Header & Footer tool lets you add all of this to an existing PDF in seconds, directly in your browser, without uploading the file anywhere.
The heart of the tool is a grid of six independent text zones: left, centre and right in the header, and left, centre and right in the footer. This mirrors how professional word processors and layout programs handle running heads, and it means you can, for example, put a company name top-left, a document title top-centre, a date top-right, a copyright note bottom-left, an automatic page number bottom-centre and a file name bottom-right — all at once. Any zone you leave blank is simply skipped, so a single centred footer is just as easy as a fully populated layout.
What turns plain text into a proper header/footer system is dynamic fields. Instead of typing a page number that would be wrong on every other page, you insert a field such as {page} and the tool fills in the correct number on each page automatically. The available fields include {page} (current page), {pages} (total pages), {date} (today's date), {time} (current time), {filename} (the PDF's name), {title} and {author} (from the document's metadata). You can combine them with ordinary text — for example Page {page} of {pages} or Printed {date} — and mix several fields in one zone. A row of one-click buttons inserts these fields into whichever box you last used.
Every zone shares a consistent style that you control: choose a sans-serif, serif or monospace font, set the size, make the text bold, italic or underlined, pick any colour with a visual picker or an exact hex code, and adjust the opacity so the text can be a subtle grey or a bold black. Margins give you precise placement — separate top, bottom and side values move the header and footer in from the edges of the page — so the text never crowds the content or falls too close to the trim.
Because you rarely want identical treatment on every page, the tool includes flexible page targeting. Apply the header and footer to all pages, skip the first page (ideal when the cover or title page should stay clean), apply to the first page only, the last page only, all odd or all even pages — useful for double-sided documents where left and right pages differ — or a precise custom range such as 1-3, 5, 8-10. When you use a “page X of Y” style, the numbers reflect the real pages so the result always makes sense.
A live preview renders the actual page with your header and footer drawn exactly where they will appear, and crucially it resolves the dynamic fields for the page you are viewing — so {page} shows the true page number and {date} shows today's date, with no guesswork. You can page through the document and zoom in to check alignment before committing, which is far quicker than processing the whole file just to see how it looks.
When you are happy, the output options finish the job. Rename the downloaded file, choose whether to preserve or remove the document metadata, and optionally compress the output using object streams. You can download the PDF immediately or send it straight to your printer. The header and footer are drawn onto the pages as part of the PDF's content, so they appear in every viewer and print exactly as positioned, while the rest of the document is left untouched — the operation adds text only, it never re-renders or degrades your pages.
Privacy underpins the whole design. Your PDF is read, previewed and processed entirely on your own device using JavaScript; nothing is uploaded, stored or logged, so the tool is safe for contracts, financial statements, medical records and any confidential document. Password-protected PDFs you are authorised to open are handled locally, large multi-hundred-page files are supported, and there is no account to create, no software to install and no watermark added. Whether you are numbering a legal bundle, branding a proposal, dating a report or adding a confidentiality note to sensitive pages, the tool produces a clean, professional result in seconds.