thanks There's a comment at the top of the javadoc for the lowagie Document class (I saw it at http://www.docjar.com/docs/api/com/lowagie/text/Document.html) anonymous wrote : When you change the header/footer on a certain page, this will be effective starting on the next page. and the example below seems to imply that if the header and footer are set on the Document object prior to calling open() then they will appear on the page. I haven't tested it though However, given the nested nature of the PDF tags I'm not sure how you'd discover the header/footer tags in the encodeBegin of the Document tag... unless you can delay opening the document until the first non-header/footer tag is added to it View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4005857#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...