Adding Page Numbers to Google Documents

Friday, March 07, 2008

Adding Page Numbers to Google Documents

Google finally realized that the headers and footers from Google Docs have almost no real use, as you can't add dynamic information like page numbers or the current date. Until Google adds these options in the interface, you can edit the document's HTML code to use them. To add a header that displays "Page (current page number) of (total number of pages)" , click on "Edit HTML" and add this code at the beginning of the document:

<div style="text-align: right;" class="google_header">Page <span class="google_pagenumber">1</span> of <span class="google_pagecount">1</span></div>

When you save the document as a PDF, the header will look like this:

For footers, you should add this at the bottom of the document, in HTML view:

<div style="text-align: right;" class="google_footer" id="google_footer">Page <span class="google_pagenumber">1</span> of <span class="google_pagecount">1</span></div>

It's a good idea to go back to the rich text editor quickly if you don't want to see the horrible code generated by Google Docs. The "dynamic" headers and footers are visible only if you export the document to PDF, for example to print it.

Labels: Google Docs

9 comments ( Post a comment )

Brad said on March 7, 2008 10:53 PM PDT:

Actually, it is possible to use GDocs to do the page number deal. It's just combining the header with the document and print settings.

Example Doc. Ignore the actual content of the document. As you can see, it's an APA-style paper, complete with a header.

All you have to do is set the default document font in the doc settings to the font and size you use in that header.

Make a header that's, for instance, a two-word abbrev. title with five spaces.

THEN, select "Top Right" from the page numbers selection list in the print menu.

It should all line up and work just like MSWord, just a little more complex -- but WITHOUT any html to scare away novices.

Pascal said on March 8, 2008 1:46 AM PDT:

If you export a PDF you can choose if there should be Pages nummbers

Ionut Alex Chitu said on March 8, 2008 2:06 AM PDT:

Yes, I knew that, but you don't have any formatting options. Your method only shows the number of the current page, but you can't display:

-4-
(4)
Page 4 of 10

you can't change the color, the font etc.

Brad said on March 8, 2008 8:46 AM PDT:

You're right -- your technique is pretty boss.

KenBW2 said on March 9, 2008 7:14 PM PDT:

Pagination - now THERE's a feature GDocs badly needs...

ferretman said on March 10, 2008 9:00 AM PDT:

Why does the footer HTML have the div 'id' and 'class', but the header HTML hasn't got the 'id'? And also, why does it have to be exported as a PDF? Surely it would be more useful if that wasn't necessary?

halestorrm said on March 10, 2008 10:31 AM PDT:

another good use of google's 'edit html' is for inserting greek characters (or any other characters not present in the 'insert special character' menu...). it's pretty useful when co-editing a scientific paper, and i'm sure there are plenty more applications.

simply find the html code for the symbol of interest here. then just throw that into the html version of the google doc.

its much quicker/easier than the advanced insertion of unicode letters, which you have to browse one by one...i found that some unicode strings didnt even work for some greek letters.

g said on November 19, 2008 12:53 AM PDT:

Take care: when you export to rtf or odf the pagenumber footer is * converted * to static text at the end of the document (useless)

Anonymous said on May 18, 2009 6:12 PM PDT:

Generated PDF doesnt contain page numbers. The last page just shows Page 1 of x! Major Fail!

What do you think?