Starting page numbers at 600

Question

I use enscript to add page numbers to PDF files generated from libreoffice. I use the following script and have always started numbering at page 1. Now I want to start numbering at page 600 and my guesses don't work. The script still writes page numbers starting at page 1.

I know " -b'||$% ' " is what writes the page number. I have changed "seq 1 900" to "seq 600 900" but it still starts at 1. So I changed $% to $(i) as per the man pages which say % means current page but then there are no pages numbers. I tried $(for i in $(seq 609 900)) and get a ) on every page. $i(for i in $(seq 609 900)) gives no page numbers. Clearly I am thrashing.

There are 300 pages in the current PDF. Here is the original script.

enscript -F Times-Roman16 -L1 -b'||$% ' -o- < <(for i in $(seq 1 900); do echo; done) | ps2pdf - | pdftk 'original.pdf' multistamp - output numbered.pdf

The script came from http://www.dry-lab.org/blog/2018/numbering-pages-of-a-pdf

Thank you.

Answer 1

In effect for legal proceedings documents are "Bates" numbered so there are no rules unless the "Court" dictates them, but they are often 2 or 3 parts.

Doc 001 - page 001 - (form 001) may well be overkill MyDoc-pg 001 would be just as effective. For personal use, in most cases cpdf will do "Bates Stamps".

There is a small free for commercial use tool, that works cross platform and has some useful ways to handle programming tasks such as numbering pages by "stamping" on PDF documents so in this case we can run 2 lines to cover the 100 pages 3 lines for 100 up to 109 pages etc.

https://pdfcpu.io/

pdfcpu stamp add -p 1-9 -mode text "Page 60%p" "pos:tr, points:12, sc:1.0 abs, rot:0" 101blanks.pdf 0-99-tmp.pdf
pdfcpu stamp add -p 10-99 -mode text "Page 6%p" "pos:tr, points:12, sc:1.0 abs, rot:0" 0-99-tmp.pdf 601-699+2.pdf

Clearly the last 2 pages of my 101 example will not be numbered but they could be set individually say Appendix 1 and Appendix 2

Also note that via this method, there is no "600" so you would need to possibly add that as a cover page, at the front.

Text position can be simply Top or Bottom (left centre right) or used centred as a "watermark stamp", in many different fashions like rotated diagonally. there is also the watermark command to do similar.