Re-numbering Adobe Acrobat pages

I often download book chapters from the library, then compile the ones I want to keep. But every now and again the book chapters don't show their numbers correctly in the page x of x field in the Navigation Toolbar, which seems to affect being able to compile or extract pages. It seems that the page lacks a name, or a label, so the software app doesn't know what the object is for the action I am asking the app to take.

And then I stumbled upon the answer. All we need to do is to number the pages. And we do that by: 

1. Going to "Tools" | "Organize pages"
2. Selecting the page range we want to rename
3. Selecting "Page labels", and when the dialogue box opens, select the (a) style of numbering - for example, "i, ii, iii..."; then (b) a prefix if required... but don't need this for front matter though; (c) the starting page number - usually "i" if front matter
4. Clicking OK (Adobe, 2025).

And, like magic, there are now page labels that the bottom of each thumbnail. And the corresponding page letter, number, or name in the Navigation toolbar.

And it is the same process to "renumber" the cover in the label dialogue box: from step 3 above, we select the (a) style of numbering as None"; then (b) in prefix we enter Cover; then (c) enter the starting page number of 1 (Olivo, 2013). And lo! We have a cover label. 

And now we have all our pages numbered, with no more blanks in the page range in the Navigation toolbar.

Easy when we know how.

Sam

References:

Adobe. (2025, September 23). Renumber pages in PDFs. https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/desktop/edit-documents/organize-pages/renumber-pages.html

Olivo, V. (2013, December 8). how do i rename a page in my PDF?. Acrobat Library. https://answers.acrobatusers.com/how-rename-page-PDF-q91181.aspx