Running headers exist because pages get separated
A document you send as one file rarely stays one object. It gets printed and stapled, photocopied without its cover, pulled apart to sign one page, scanned back in with a page missing, or read on a phone a screen at a time. A running header and footer are what let any single sheet still say what it belongs to.
That is the test for everything you put in them. Not "does this look professional" but "if someone finds this page on a printer tray with nothing else, what do they need to know?" Usually: what the document is, who issued it, and whether they are allowed to be reading it.
The browser writes the file
The text is laid out as a page with a bar fixed to the top and another fixed to the bottom, that page opens in a new tab, and the browser's print dialogue appears. Choosing Save as PDF as the destination produces the document. Nothing is uploaded, and if no new tab opens, a pop-up blocker stopped it — allow pop-ups for the site and run it again.
Because the bars are fixed to the page rather than sitting in the flow of the text, they repeat on every sheet the document runs to. That is the behaviour you want, and it is also what makes the two settings in the next section matter.
Give the print dialogue room for them
Increase the margins. The repeating bars sit at the very top and bottom of each page. With narrow margins the body text on the second and later pages can run underneath them. A wider top and bottom margin fixes it, and the print preview will show you immediately whether it has.
Turn off the browser's own headers and footers. Most browsers stamp the page title, the URL, the date and a page number onto every sheet by default. Leave that on and the document carries two headers, one of which reads about:blank. The option is usually under "More settings".
What belongs in the header
Keep it to one line, because that is all the space there is. In practice one of three things earns the place:
- The document title, in the form someone would use to ask for it — "Q3 Site Survey", not "Report".
- A classification, where one applies:
Confidential, Draft — not for circulation, Commercial in confidence.
- A version and date, for anything that will be revised. Two undated printouts of the same document are worse than one.
Combine at most two of those. A header that runs to eleven words stops being read after the first page, which defeats the point of repeating it.
What belongs in the footer, and the page-number trap
The footer is where the small print goes: the issuing organisation, a reference number, a contact address, a copyright line, a retention notice. Anything a reader might need to act on the document rather than understand it.
One thing to be careful with. The footer is a fixed string that repeats unchanged, so it counts nothing. Typing Page 1 of 4 puts "Page 1 of 4" at the foot of all four pages, which is not a small cosmetic flaw — a reader checking whether they have the whole document is misled by exactly the thing they would check. Write a footer that is true on every page, and get real numbering either from the browser's own footer setting or from a tool that stamps numbers into a finished PDF.
Plain text in, plain text out
The body is treated as plain text. Line breaks and blank lines are preserved, so paragraph structure survives a paste intact, but nothing else does: no bold, no headings within the body, no bullet characters rendered as lists, no tables, no images. Text copied from a word processor arrives as words alone.
Given that, white space is the only structural signal you have, so use it deliberately. A blank line between sections and short paragraphs will carry a two- or three-page document perfectly well. Beyond that length, a document wants real headings and a word processor to make them.
What [msm_tool slug="pdf-header-footer"] is actually for is the case that comes up constantly and has no good answer otherwise: text you already have, which needs to go out looking like an issued document rather than an email, today.
Check page two
The whole purpose of a running header is that it repeats, so the only page that proves it works is the second one. Look at it in the print preview: the bars are present, the body text clears them, and the spacing is the same as on page one.
Then read the header itself once more before saving. It is the line most likely to be wrong and least likely to be reread, and a stale Draft or last quarter's version number is going to appear on every single sheet.