FWIW, Charles' suggestion of the page number fiddling will allow you to change the page numbers in the footer BUT the Table of Contents will not align with those displayed 'page numbers'.

That latest bit of information reminds me of your initial post where you said you were able to post-process the page numbers in PDF so you do know how to edit PDF files.

With those two bits of information, I would recommend:
1. Create two documents
Doc 1 = Covers
Doc 2 = Body content and Table of Contents
2. Export both docs to PDF
3. Insert the various cover pages as new pages into the Doc 2 PDF

Now thinking about it, another solution would be to create the Word doc and put all the covers at the back of the file after a section break. Then you can either:
a. Save As PDF and use a PDF Editor to move the resulting pages to position the covers where you want them.
b. Use the Print command to create the PDF and specify the pages in a non-standard order eg 1-8,21,9-14,22,15-20.

Of the two above options, (a) would allow you to have PDF bookmarks working in the resulting file but (b) would probably not so if you wanted that you might need to manually add them with a PDF editor.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia