If you’ve been using Nitro Pro for a while and have wondered what the Bates Number feature is for, read on for an introduction.
photo credit: Joseph Robertson
The PDF editing tool is based on the Bates stamp that has been used for decades to add a unique number to a series of pages. As you stamp each page, the number on the Bates stamp increases by one — giving you a quicker method for numbering a bunch of pages than writing it by hand. Of course, either way, it’s painfully slow! Our electronic version of Bates stamping reduces days of work to a few seconds, and does it more accurately.
The most common use of Bates numbering occurs in the legal world, a field in which it’s essential that all pages in a document collection are uniquely labelled, accounted for, and easier to locate and cite. The beauty of working with electronic documents is you can search by Bates number, so any page can be retrieved in seconds.
If you want to check out the tool in Nitro Pro, go to Insert and Edit > Header and Footers > Bates Number.
You start by configuring the numbering. If you are continuing the numbering sequence from documents that have already been numbered, then you must specify the number to resume at. If you want to attach case codes or other reference numbers, you can include them via the suffix and prefix fields.
After that, it’s typically just a matter of setting the appearance and positioning of the Bates numbering, and then processing the PDF file.
The real power comes when you want to process a whole collection of PDF files in the one go. To do that, at the beginning you just add the step of selecting the files to process (see screenshot below), order them correctly, and then adjust the appearance and positioning as described above.
For a step-by-step guide, see our How to add PDF Bates numbering help page.
