WalkingPDF

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The stamp prints over the words

A stamp placed on top of body text makes the words it covers unreadable in the copy that gets served, and a stamp placed too close to the paper edge is cropped by the printer or the scanner. Neither changes the file's numbering, so neither is caught by counting anything - it is a check of where the glyphs actually sit.

Two placements that fail

Both survive every numbering check, because the number is present, unique and in sequence. The failure is spatial, and the only way to see it is to compare the box the stamp occupies against the boxes every other glyph on the page occupies.

  • **On the text.** The stamp's baseline lands on a line of the document, so its characters and the document's characters occupy the same space. The number is readable and the sentence under it is not.
  • **Off the edge.** The stamp sits within a few millimetres of the trim, inside the non-printable margin most printers and scanners ignore. On screen it is there; on the served copy it is a partial number.

Why it happens at the end of a long day

Stamp placement is usually a single setting applied to a whole batch: top right, bottom right, a fixed offset. A batch is not uniform - cover pages, landscape exhibits, pages with a header rule, pages scanned with a dark edge - and the one setting that is right for 90% of the set is wrong for the rest. The pages it is wrong for are the ones nobody opens again before serving.

What it takes to detect it

Not the text layer. A stamp and a line of body text drawn on the same baseline come back from a PDF parser as one run of characters, so comparing text runs finds nothing - there is no second box to compare against. The check asks for the position of every individual glyph, unions the stamp's own characters into a box, and reports an overlap when the two boxes occupy the same space by more than 1.5 points on both axes. The character immediately either side of the stamp is skipped, because a citation such as "see ABC000417" is supposed to be next to the number.

Check this set for it now

Upload the PDFs you are about to serve, plus the DAT and OPT if you have them, or one ZIP of the folder. The verdict, the file list and the worst findings are free. You pay only if you want the certificate, the report and the findings CSV to hand to somebody else.

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Frequently asked questions

Is a stamp over text always a defect?

It is a warning rather than a blocker, because a stamp can overlay a header rule or a page number without hiding anything a reader needs. The finding names the page and quotes the words underneath so the decision takes seconds.

Does the check flag a citation of the Bates number in the body text?

No. A document that cites its own production number - "see ABC000417" - puts the characters next to the stamp, and the check skips the glyph immediately either side for exactly that reason. It reports stamps that sit on top of unrelated words.

How close to the edge is too close?

The check uses the page's own edge and reports the distance it measured, rather than applying a house style. A stamp inside the margin that your printer or scanner crops is the case that matters, and the finding states how far from the trim it actually sits.

Keep reading

hub What we check, and what each check means Seventy checks run against a production. Each one is a deterministic read of the files - the stamps on the pages, the structure of the PDF, the rows of the load file - and each returns a pass, a warning or a blocker with the file and page it came from. Nothing here is a model's opinion, and nothing here is claimed on the certificate unless it actually ran. guide Why Bates numbers show up in keyword search A stamp is either an image drawn on the page or text added to the content stream. When it is text, it stays in the text layer, and every keyword search for that number or for a stray date inside it returns the page. Receiving parties use stamped numbers as identifiers, so a searchable stamp quietly pollutes their results - and in the worst case leaks a number into a privilege log as if it were document content. guide Adobe stamps in the wrong order - here is why Acrobat's Bates numbering runs over the file list exactly as it was given to it. Select a folder and the list is name-sorted; the numbers are then continuous, unique and in an order nobody chose. The set looks perfect and is numbered by filename. This page explains the mechanism, the two ways it goes wrong, and the check that finds it in a minute. checker A Bates number that appears twice A duplicate Bates number means two pages answer to the same citation. In a review platform the second one overwrites or collides with the first; on paper, a request to "turn to ABC000418" has two answers. It is one of the few production defects that is always wrong, because there is no protocol in which two pages may share a number. checker Pages no search can reach A page with no text layer is a picture. It opens, it prints, it looks correct - and no keyword search in any review platform will ever return it. A production where some pages are searchable and some are not is worse than one where none are, because the reviewer has no reason to suspect the gap. checker The DAT row with nothing behind it A load file is a list of instructions: this document, these pages, this image. When a row points at a file that is not in the production, the platform importing it either skips the document or refuses the load. Either way the set that was served and the set that was described are not the same set.