Printing Portrait Page Numbers on Landscape Pages

It is not uncommon to print pages of your document in landscape format. This is particularly helpful for some tabular information or certain charts or images. In these instances, you may still want to print page numbers in the same position they appear on the rest of your document. If you are using Word 97 or later, this problem has been partially resolved because you can rotate text on a page. However, in Word 6 or Word 95, you cannot do this.

In this case, there are a couple of approaches you can take. First of all, you can use Excel or WordArt to put in page numbers by following these steps:

1. Make sure a section break exists on each side of your landscape page. (You should already have done this to switch from portrait to landscape modes in the same document.)
2. Position the insertion point within the landscape section and choose Header and Footer from the View menu. This displays the Header and Footer toolbar. (Click here to see a related figure.)
3. Make sure the header (or footer) is not linked to the previous section's header or footer. You do this by clicking on the Same as Previous icon on the dialog box.
4. Jump to the next section (the portrait-mode section following the landscape section) and unlink the header and footer again.
5. Return to the landscape section and delete the header or footer on that page.
6. If you want to use Excel for the page number, skip to step 10.
7. Choose Object from the Insert menu, and then choose WordArt.
8. Using WordArt, enter the page number for the page, format it as desired (to match font and size of your other page numbers) and then rotate it by 90 degrees.
9. Close WordArt and close the Header and Footer toolbar; you are now done adding the page number. (You can skip the rest of the steps.)
10. Open an Excel spreadsheet.
11. In a cell (any cell) type the page number you want to use, and then format the font and size to match your other Word page numbers.
12. Choose Cells from the Format menu, then click on the Alignment tab.
13. Choose the dialog box options that rotate and center the cell contents.
14. Close the Format Cells dialog box.
15. Press CTRL+C to copy the cell to the Clipboard.
16. Switch to Word and choose Paste Special from the Edit menu.
17. Choose Microsoft Excel Worksheet Object, then click on OK.
18. Close the Header and Footer toolbar.

These steps allow you to insert a page number that is rotated in the direction of your other portrait pages. The remaining problem, however, is that the page number still does not appear along the proper edge of your paper, as you would ultimately desire. If you have a PostScript printer, you can get around this problem entirely by following the first five steps of the foregoing, and then adding the following as a field in the header or footer:

Print \p page " /PageNum (13) def /PSize 10 def
/PFont (Helvetica-BoldOblique) def /PMarg .5 def
wp$x wp$right sub wp$left add 2 div 72 PMarg mul
translate PFont findfont PSize scalefont setfont
PageNum stringwidth pop 2 div neg 0 moveto PageNum show "

This PostScript code prints a single page number at the center of the proper edge of the paper. The first part of the code specifies a few variables, which you can change to fit your needs. The /PageNum variable specifies the page number to be printed (in this case 13), the /PSize variable is the font size to use, the /PFont variable is the name of the font to use (in this case Helvetica-BoldOblique), and the /PMarg variable is the distance from the edge of the paper at which the page number should be printed, in inches (in this case, .5 inches).

You should note that when you add the above-noted field to your header or footer, you should make sure that it is entered as one continuous line. (If you copy the information from this Web page, when you paste it into the header or footer field it will have line breaks in some places. These should be removed.)