Adding Exhibit Stamps with Adobe Acrobat

I found a great tool from Adobe to add dynamic Exhibit stamps / tags via Acrobat.  Our office uses the tried-and-true method of manually applying stickers to the exhibits to be used in court.  I got the request earlier this week to see if I could super-impose the tags right on to a few photos that will be used in a future trial.  Luckily, there were a couple good resources about this online, and Adobe actually released someone’s work on the task: http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/2009/05/add-dynamic-exhibit-stamps-in-acrobat-using-a-free-stamp-set/.

These stamps are great, and wicked easy to modify.  I changed the background from transparent so they would look like stickers, and changed the default text.  I’m not sure how much we will use this, but at least the tool is available.  The process to get this going in Adobe Acrobat X (I use Pro but you can use it in Standard as well, I’m sure) is:

1. Download the file in the above link.
2. Save the resulting file (it’s a .pdf) in the Stamps directory (in Windows 7 it’s in your user profile\appdata\roaming\adobe\acrobat\10\stamps, I believe).
3. Now, when you are in Acrobat, you can click over on ‘Comment’, then on the Stamp icon and you will see the Exhibit tabs as an option to add as a stamp.
4. Click on the tab you want to use, then just move it over to the part of the PDF you are using, and you will be prompted to give it a name.
5. Once on the PDF, you can resize the tab – this works really well!

There are some customizations you can do right in the initial downloaded PDF – it’s just an Acrobat form.  See the above link for more details.  There is also some info (for Acrobat 9 people) here: http://www.pdfforlawyers.com/2009/05/using-acrobat-to-put-exhibit-stamps-on-digital-documents.html