If your regulatory authority requires you to have sequential page numbering of your entire submission, you can do this electronically using Adobe Acrobat. It's a bit painful (though not as painful as manually stamping each page!). This can only be done when the entire submission is 100% complete - any changes will require starting the page numbering over again. So of course it requires adding an extra day (or more) into your timelines.
My method is to list all the documents to be included in the submission, in order, with their page counts. I then calculate the entire page count of the submission and the page numbers of each section (e.g., document X runs from pages 1135 to 1157). I have a very basic Excel spreadsheet that calculates this for me. (Word of warning: you really want to triple check to make sure this is correct so you don't have to redo everything due to a calculation/counting error. Guess how I know.)
Then I go into each PDF individually and add page headers/footers using Acrobat. Even if your documents already have headers/footers, you can add new ones that sit very close to the top/bottom of the page. I include the total pagination of the document (e.g., page 1135 of 8012) and whatever other information I want. I then save this header/footer combination with a name and save a new paginated copy of the PDF. Before closing, I confirm that the first and last pages of the file are numbered as I expected (e.g., "page 1135 of 8012" to "page 1157 of 8012").
Repeat ad nauseum until all files have been paginated. Note that since you have saved your header/footer combo with a name, you can easily apply it to each file without having to manually set each option; you just need to change the starting page number for each file. This also means the headers/footers are the same for each file, giving a consistent look to your entire submission.
Obviously these instructions are abbreviated, but hopefully this gives enough information to help people figure it out if they'd like to try it. And of course this takes quite a bit of time for a large submission - but it's actually very workable for a smaller submission and, in my opinion, can help provide additional cohesion and structure to aid the reviewer.
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Jennifer Cabralda, RAC (US, CAN)
Senior Manager, Regulatory Affairs
Richmond, BC, Canada
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Original Message:
Sent: 13-Jan-2020 06:55
From: James Davis
Subject: All pages of the submission are numbered
Hi All.
All pages should be numbered in such a manner that information can be referenced by page number. This may
be done either by consecutively numbering the entire submission, or numbering the pages within a section (e.g.,
12-1, 12-2…).
How have people managed the page numbering within their submissions? On first look, it is straight forward, you just number 1 - x for each document right!
I will take a guess that most submissions would be made up of different documents, volumes / sections where each would have their own page numbers! How have you demonstrated this on the RTA checklist as there is only a column for entering the page number, not document number.
Thanks
James
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James
Head of QARA
UK
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