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Participating Frequently
April 9, 2018
Answered

I want the Bates numbering I added to be visible in the digital version and invisible when the document is printed

  • April 9, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 7925 views

My PDFs need to include Bates numbering so I can locate them quickly when working with them in the office but I also want to be able to print a document without the Bates number so I can use it in court. How do I make that happen?

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Correct answer Karl Heinz Kremer

First, thank you for responding. I found preflight but I don't see an option to search for content based on unique properties nor do I see an option regarding layer properties. I click on preflight but there is no option for "preflight check." Could you give me a bit more information?

And, really, thank you so much for your advice. I appreciate it!


If you've never worked with the Preflight tool, this gets a bit complicated.

When you open Preflight, you will see three different categories: Profiles, checks and fixups:

For what you want to do, we need one new "Check", and one new "Fixup". So, first select the "Check" category (that's the magnifying glass in the middle), and then use the menu under "Options" to select "Create Check".

Before we create the check, let's take a step back to what Stephen said: You want to search for text in e.g. a certain font that is only used for your Bates numbers, so that you can then move the text that is set in that font to a dedicated layer. This means that you first have to select what font you want to use (this should be a font that does not appear anywhere else in your documents). I selected "Baskerville" for my example. We now need to create a new "Check" that identifies all "Baskerville" text.

The first thing we do with your new check, is to give it a meaningful name. I named mine "Font is Baskerville". Here is how I set it up:

As you can see, we need a "Group" and a certain "Property" to add an item. I've highlighted the group/property information for the three steps. You first select e.g. "Page Description" in the list of groups, and that then filters what gets shown in the property list. So, we are looking for:

- objects that are text

- with a font that matches "Baskerville"

- with a font size of about 8pt (+/- 0.1pt)

You can use the search field at the top to e.g. find the "Base font name" property without having to scroll thorough the whole list.

When you are done, click on the "OK" button to save this check.

Now we create a new fixup. Click on the Wrench button, and then select to create a new Fixup under the Options menu. Give it a good name (e.g. Move "Baskerville" text to "Bates" layer).

Once the fixup is created, you can use it. In the following screenshot, I am filtering all Fixups by searching for only those that contain "bask":

Once located, select the fixup and then click on the "Fix" button at the bottom of the dialog. This will create the new layer and will then allow you to go into the layer configuration as demonstrated by Stephen and configure it to not print.

1 reply

Stephen Marsh
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 9, 2018

Optional Content Groups (Layers):

Preflight Check to find content based on unique properties of the Bates numbering (such as font). Preflight Fix-up to move the content found via the Check to a new “layer” (OCG).

Participating Frequently
April 9, 2018

Thank you for your response but I don't understand it at all. Is Preflight Check included with my Adobe subscription or is it some kind of third party service?

Participating Frequently
April 12, 2018

If you can post a link to a sample PDF at a DropBox or other file sharing site, I can make more detailed analysis and comment.

The check screenshot posted by Karl was very specific. You could try to make your check more general… Such as rather than the font name equal to Baskerville, you could change it to contain Baskerville etc. (as long as this did not pick up other text that was not a Bates number, you have to be careful to target only what you wish).

Just to be clear, if there are no existing OCG/Layers in the PDF, a successful run of the fix-up would only create 1 layer (only for the bates text) – not 2 explicit layers:

(Adobe has confused things IMHO by naming OCG as Layers, as OCG are quite different to layers as found in other CC apps).


I've uploaded it to Dropbox. How do I get it to you?

And, again, thank you so much for your assistance!!!!