What Is Bates Numbering, and Can I Add It to a PDF?
Written and fact-checked by The EditPDF AI Team
Bates numbering is a fixed-length, prefixed identifier (like SMITH-000142) stamped on every page across an entire document production, so any single page can be found and referenced unambiguously — a legal-industry convention, not a generic page-numbering feature.
How is Bates numbering different from ordinary page numbers?
Ordinary page numbers restart at 1 for every document and exist to help a reader navigate one file. Bates numbers do the opposite: they run continuously across every page of every document in a production — often with a fixed digit width and a prefix identifying the case or party — specifically so a single page can be cited by its number alone, without naming which file it came from.
- ·Ordinary numbering: "Page 3 of 12" — resets per document, meant for a human reader
- ·Bates numbering: "SMITH-000142" — a unique, sequential identifier valid across an entire multi-document set
Does EditPDF AI support Bates numbering?
Not the specific prefix-plus-fixed-width format — Add Page Numbers currently applies sequential numbers within a single document, not a continuous prefixed sequence across multiple files. If your workflow specifically requires true Bates numbering across a document production, dedicated litigation-support software is the more reliable choice today.
If you just need consistent, sequential numbering on a single document's pages, Add Page Numbers handles that directly. For multi-file numbering, merge the files into one document with PDF Merger first, then apply sequential numbering to the combined file — this gets you a continuous count, just without a custom prefix or fixed digit padding.
A practical workaround for small document sets
- 1Merge every document in the set into a single PDF, in the order you want them numbered, using PDF Merger.
- 2Open the combined file in Add Page Numbers and apply sequential numbering starting from 1 (or your preferred start number).
- 3Download the numbered file. Every page now has a unique, continuous number, even though it isn't in the SMITH-000142 prefix format specifically.
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