I tend to work with collections of scanned documents, which are labelled similarly to the following:
A1-249
B1-55
C1-71,71a-71aq,72-134
D1-84
etc.
(So other documents can occasionally get inserted into the middle, but the original page numbers can't change.)
Now I can set this page numbering up in the thumbnails, and everything works as expected. However, if I set up a footer with page numbers, it still numbers the pages 1-xxx, even though the pages are correctly numbered in the thumbnails.
I guess my question is "is there any way to get Acrobat Pro XI to print the page numbers as displayed below the page thumbnails on the page itself".
Those are actually called "page labels", and no, you can't include them in the text when add a footer using the built-in function, but it can be done if a script is used.