Creating Custom Dynamic Stamps with Adobe^® Acrobat^® 8

By Michael Dakan

In Adobe Acrobat, you can add an online stamp to a PDF document in much the same way you apply a rubber stamp to a paper document — for instance, to show the document’s approval status or the date it was received. We first looked at creating Adobe PDF Stamps with Acrobat 7.0 about a year ago, in Acrobat Insider #11, where I described how a Dallas architectural firm uses stamps to save time and money. That issue generated quite a bit of feedback and questions from our readers, so we thought it would be good to revisit the topic, even though not much has changed with stamps in Adobe 8.

Many questions revolved around custom stamps, especially custom stamps containing dynamic fields that automatically derive values from preset user profile information and computer system information such as the current date and time. So this month I’ll show you how to create a dynamic custom stamp by following these steps:

1. Set your Identity Preferences
2. Create the custom stamp
3. Add dynamic fields

For an introduction to stamp basics, see Issue #11.

First Create Your Identity

Before we get started, it’s important to fill in your Identity Preferences. This is the information that Acrobat uses for signatures, dynamic stamps, comments, and elsewhere. From the Edit menu, select Preferences, scroll down the categories, and select Identity. Then enter all the relevant information such as your name, company, and email address. This information seldom changes, so you shouldn’t have to enter it manually each time it's used.

Before creating a custom stamp, enter your Identity Preferences.

Create a Custom Stamp

The first step in creating a custom stamp is to choose a starting image, such as a company logo or the original artwork used to create one of your existing rubber stamps, like a "Document Received" stamp. Try to make the image as small as possible — ideally, smaller than 100 K; anything over than 500 K will make the stamp too large for most purposes.

Here's the image that I used as the starting image for the dynamic custom stamp.

From the Tools menu, select Comment & Markup > Stamps > Create Custom Stamp. In the dialog box, browse to the image file you want for the starting image and click OK. Then enter a category and name. This dialog box includes a check box for reducing the image’s file size. If the starting image you selected is a raster file, such as JPG, TIF, or WMF, check this box. If you start with a PDF file, uncheck the box, since the PDF will already be as small as you need.

The Create Custom Stamp dialog box

After clicking OK, the starting image will appear in the Acrobat 8 workspace, where you can edit it and add elements to the custom stamp. Looking at the available stamps in the Stamps menu (Tools | Comments & Markup), you can see the new category and stamp name.

I can access the new custom stamp through the Stamps menu.
 

Add Dynamic Fields

The easiest way to make a custom stamp dynamic is to copy a field from one of the dynamic stamps that comes with Acrobat and paste it onto your new custom stamp. (You can see a list of these on the Stamps menu: Tools > Comment & Markup > Stamps > Dynamic.)

Before opening the Dynamic stamps file, you first need to make sure that Single Key Accelerators is enabled in your Acrobat program General Preferences. (You’ll discover why we do this below.) From the Edit menu, select Preferences, and click the General category in the list on the left. In the dialog box that appears, check the first box labeled “Use single-key accelerators to access tools.” Click OK.

Now you need to access the dynamic stamps that come with Acrobat 8. These are in a file called Dynamic.PDF, located here:

\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\Acrobat\plug_ins\Annotations\Stamps\ENU\Dynamic.pdf

Using Acrobat, open this file. Find a stamp that contains a field you want to copy to your custom stamp. For instance, if you want to add a field that shows the date and time the file was inserted from your system, you can copy the field on the “Approved” stamp. (Note that the word "Foozle" appears in dynamic fields as a placeholder for the name in your Identity Preferences.)

Type ‘R’ (the one-key accelerator that highlights and allows you to select one of the fields). Then right-click the field that you want to copy and select Edit > Copy.

In the fields in dynamic stamps, the name “Foozle” is a placeholder for the name you specify in your Identity Preferences.

Close the Dynamic.pdf file and open the file containing your new custom stamp, located here:

\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Acrobat\8.0\Stamps

Open the PDF file most recently created in this folder; it contains the custom stamp we just created. Like the other custom stamp files, this file has a nonsensical 16-character alpha-numeric name. If you want, you can rename the file using Windows^® Explorer before you add the dynamic field.

Paste the dynamic field onto the stamp by selecting Paste from the Edit menu. Type ‘R’ again to highlight and select the pasted field. You can stretch it to size and move it to its desired final location. By double-clicking the field, you can also display the Text Field Properties dialog box, where you can modify the field’s appearance and other settings. (Alternatively, you can right-click the field and select Field Properties.)
 

After you paste the dynamic field into your custom stamp, you can change the appearance and other field properties.

Repeat this copy-and-paste procedure for each dynamic field you want to add to your custom dynamic stamp. I used two dynamic fields in my stamp, the “by Foozle-Date-Time field,” which is used in several of the standard dynamic stamps, and the “Company name field (Acrobat)” from the CONFIDENTIAL stamp. When you place this stamp on a PDF document, the placeholder text is replaced by the information from your Identity settings, along with the date and time for your current system settings. Now save the file. (Don’t use Save As, because you want the file to remain in the default Documents and Settings folder location.)

If you’ve been successful so far, you should be able to see and place your custom dynamic stamp using the Stamp tool and palette. In the Manage Stamps dialog box (Tools | Comments & Markup | Stamps | Manage Stamps), you can correct any naming mistakes by renaming a stamp, move a stamp into another category, create a new category, and more. Select the file you want to change and click the Edit button.

Here’s our final custom stamp placed on a PDF document.

We can hope that a future upgrade to Acrobat will provide the tools necessary to create dynamic stamps in a much more elegant and intuitive manner. But for now, something like this confusing procedure will have to do. If you’ve discovered a better, simpler way to accomplish this, we’d love to hear about it and share it with other readers! Send it to us, and we’ll publish your method with full credits in a future edition of Acrobat Insider for AEC.

Tips and Tricks: Rotating Stamps

A stamp is initially placed in orthogonal format, assuming that’s the way it was created. To rotate it, just place it in its default orientation. Once it’s in the document, use the Hand tool to click on the stamp to select it. A round handle will appear in the center, just above the top of the stamp. Grab this handle and rotate.