thanks for the advice. i ended up making an array of pages and then at the end i cycled through the array and numbered the pages based on $pdf->pages; so i had something like $elementNumber of $pdf->pages; at the top of each page. i guess what i was trying to figure out is if this couldn't be done through the pdf object. i figured that every time a page object was created $pdf->page; the page would be put on a list owned by the pdf instance -- yeah totally goofy don't know what i was thinking...