Add Header & Footer Text

In enterprise publishing standards, running headers and footers are divided into distinct functional zones. Professional layout designers rarely place all text in a single block; they distribute metadata logically across the upper and lower margins.

Our tool implements the industry-standard six-zone layout model: Header Left (typically used for document title or section heading), Header Center (used for corporate logos or security classifications like 'CONFIDENTIAL'), Header Right (used for date or department code), Footer Left (used for copyright notices or file names), Footer Center (used for confidentiality notices), and Footer Right (used for dynamic pagination like 'Page X of Y'). Our engine coordinates these zones simultaneously, ensuring balanced visual weighting across every page.

Manually typing page counts or document titles across dozens of pages is tedious and prone to errors. Our header and footer engine features intelligent macro variable expansion, parsing dynamic placeholder tags in real time during PDF compilation.

Supported macros include `{page}` for current page number, `{total}` for total document page count, `{date}` for current execution date (formatted to ISO standards or local conventions), `{time}` for current timestamp, and `{filename}` for the original uploaded file name. When you enter a string like 'Confidential Document — Page {page} of {total}', our worker dynamically evaluates the macro per page, injecting the calculated text string seamlessly into the page content stream.

A frequent failure of amateur PDF tools is that headers or footers overlap with existing body text or clip against physical printer margins. In the PDF specification, page dimensions are defined by five distinct box dictionaries: `/MediaBox` (the physical sheet size), `/CropBox` (the displayed visible area), `/BleedBox`, `/TrimBox`, and `/ArtBox`.

Our tool measures the active `/CropBox` of every page, establishing top and bottom margin keep-out zones (typically 36 to 54 points, or 0.5 to 0.75 inches). The engine calculates exact baseline positions relative to the bottom-left coordinate origin `(0, 0)`, ensuring that headers float comfortably in the top margin and footers sit cleanly above the bottom edge without colliding with body paragraphs or charts.

When publishing books, manuals, or bound reports intended for double-sided duplex printing, headers and footers must adapt to page parity. On odd-numbered right-hand pages (recto), chapter titles and page numbers belong on the outer right edge. On even-numbered left-hand pages (verso), document titles and page numbers belong on the outer left edge.

Our tool includes dedicated Recto/Verso alternating logic. When enabled, outer header and footer zones swap positions automatically between even and odd pages, ensuring that bound materials present a professional, symmetrical appearance when opened as a two-page spread.

Enterprise documents that require running headers and footers are typically proprietary corporate assets: business plans, financial projections, legal contracts, or internal audit findings. Uploading these sensitive assets to third-party web conversion servers introduces severe data leakage risks.

2run.tools operates on a strictly client-side architecture. Powered by WebAssembly and isolated Web Workers, all parsing, text layout calculation, font embedding, and PDF stream serialization take place entirely in your browser's private memory space. Your confidential documents are never transmitted across the internet, ensuring 100% compliance with corporate confidentiality standards.

Injecting dynamic typography into existing PDF documents requires rigorous font encoding management. Under ISO 32000, fonts in a PDF can be encoded using legacy simple encodings (such as StandardEncoding, MacRomanEncoding, or WinAnsiEncoding) or composite Type 0 CIDFonts utilizing Identity-H horizontal CMap tables.

If an injection utility naively writes UTF-8 text into a page stream expecting WinAnsi glyphs, special characters like accented letters, smart quotes, em dashes, or foreign currency symbols turn into garbled 'mojibake' rectangles. Our client-side engine embeds proper WinAnsi and Unicode CMap dictionaries alongside each embedded font descriptor, guaranteeing that international dates, author names, and mathematical symbols render with absolute typographic fidelity.

First impressions matter. Professional publications never display running headers or footers across the front cover, and executive summaries or title pages often omit headers to maintain visual elegance.

Our tool allows you to exclude the first page with a single toggle, or specify custom page ranges (such as `2-100` or `3-25, 28-50`). You can maintain a pristine, unblemished cover design while enforcing consistent corporate framing across all subsequent pages.