Bates Stamping
Document Actions
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A Bates number is known in the legal industry as a unique number assigned to each page of litigation documentation. For example, "Clarke vs Williams Exhibit A Page 1 of 30" to identify exhibits in a trial. Before the trial, each party may use Bates stamping to identify all the pages in their inventory of documentation for a case, e.g. "120001, 120002, 12003, etc."
Bates numbering has uses outside litigation as well, whenever document images need to be numbered. Designing your custom stamp is easy with ELAN Capture's Bates Stamp Designer.
Bates Stamp Toolbar
Find the Bates Stamping toolbar, and click on the Bates Stamp Designer button. The Designer window will open.
Bates Stamp Designer
The Add and Delete buttons allow you to create the multi-part stamps such as the example cited above: "Clarke vs Williams, Exhibit A Page 1 of 30." Notice the two yellow areas in the top-right corner - each area is a part of the stamp.
To create a stamp:
| 1. | Click the Add button. |
| 2. | Move your mouse over the image and draw a rectangle where you would like the stamp to appear on each document image. The rectangle will appear in yellow. You can click on the rectangle and move it to another location at any time. |
| 3. | Type in the details of your stamp: |
Prefix: the text to appear at the beginning of the stamp.
Range start: the first number in the sequence.
Range end: the last number in the sequence.
Step: the increment size for the sequence. In most cases this will be 1. In the illustration above, the increment is 2 because each image has two pages.
Suffix: text to appear at the end of the stamp.
Font: the font type to use for this stamp.
Font size: the size of the stamp font.
| 4. | Click Apply. |
| 5. | Repeat steps 1-4 for each part of the stamp for the document image. |
| 6. | You may want to save this stamp for another set of images, if so, click the Save As... button. |
| 7. | Click OK to accept your changes or Cancel to close the Designer window without making a change. |
To apply the stamp(s) to your images:
| 1. | Click the Generate Bates Stamp Layers  button. You should see the stamp name appear in the list items column of the tree, and a shaded area with your stamp text on each image. This will give you an idea of what the stamp will look like before actually burning the stamp onto the image. If you want to change the stamp, return to the Designer window where you can edit the stamp again. |
| 2. | When you are happy with how the stamp appears on your image, you need to burn it into the document to make it permanent. Click on the Burn in Bates Stamps button . You will see a confirmation dialog; this is your last chance to change your mind. Once you click Yes, the stamp becomes part of the document image. (Clicking No returns you to the Capture window where you can edit the stamp more if you like.) |