I recently upgraded to a PC that included Adobe Acrobat X on it. After reading a couple of articles on creating dynamic stamps, I decided to take a whirl. Talk about your basic exercise in futility! Adobe has gone out of its way to make this the clunkiest, convoluted process ever.
1. You design the graphic for the stamp you want to use in some graphic software. In my case an Approval with company logo.
2. Then you go into Adobe and create a custom stamp, navigating to the graphic file you created.
3. Now you have to navigate to the default Adobe dynamic stamp file and copy an existing demonic text element, after first configuring Adobe to allow you to copy it. You can't be default. I chose one that included the user's name and date created.
4. Then you have to open your custom stamp in Acrobat by navigating to a deeply hidden file with a randomly generated name.
5. Now you paste the dynamic element into your stamp which inevitably needs editing and resizing to fit.
Now I think I'm about home free. I needed to resize the element to fit my graphic and I didn't want the time, just the date to display. It's not to hard to figure out the Java script to eliminate the time but I found if I changed anything with the element, it would mysteriously drop the username. I found, after bringing my tortured stamp into PDF-XChange Viewer, it would display as designed in Acrobat but if I resized it, the name would disappear there as well.
I related this whole experience as a segway to asking what and when Tracker plans on implementing dynamic stamps.
- Will creating a dynamic stamp simply be like creating a static one except for enter simple variables for dynamic text?
Will each dynamic stamp be a single file, making distribution easier?
Thanks.