How can I read Roman page numbers?

Should I use labels or annotations to get Roman page numbers instead of indexed page numbers?

In Adobe Reader, the first pages of an ebook can have page numbers in the Roman number format. I would like to read these page numbers (instead of the indexed page number) with iText, but I don't know which properties (labels or annotations) I should use.

Posted on StackOverflow on Mar 20, 2015 by T N

You are looking for the PageLabelExample. In this example, we have a PDF, page_labels.pdf that has pages numbered like this:

Pages with page labels

In the listPageLabels() method, we create a txt file with all the page labels:

public void listPageLabels(String src, String dest) throws IOException {
    // no PDF, just a text file
    PrintStream out = new PrintStream(new FileOutputStream(dest));
    PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(src);
    String[] labels = PdfPageLabels.getPageLabels(reader);
    for (int i = 0; i

The result looks like this:

A
B
1
2
3
Movies-4
Movies-5
Movies-6
Movies-7
Movies-8

If you want an iTextSharp example, take a look at this method:

/**
 * Reads the page labels from an existing PDF
 * @param src the existing PDF
 */
public string ListPageLabels(byte[] src) {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    String[] labels = PdfPageLabels.GetPageLabels(new PdfReader(src));
    for (int i = 0; i