You likely use pdfDocs every day to create, edit, and combine PDFs. But with such a feature-rich application, you may not be aware of other time-saving tools at your fingertips. Keep reading to learn how you can use pdfDocs to do even more with your documents.

1. Apply Bates Numbering across multiple PDFs at once

Bates Stamping or Bates Numbering is used to label legal, medical, and business documents. It applies a unique identifier to each page of a document, usually within the header or footer.

Using pdfDocs, you can instantly apply Bates Numbering in the headers or footers of your documents. Simply press ‘Apply Header & Footer’ in the Edit tab and choose from the options menu.

You can also set pdfDocs to automatically output PDF binders made in Binder Project Mode with Bates Numbering as the filenames.

2. Find and redact sensitive information

Redaction is when you block out confidential or private information in a document to not be read. pdfDocs provides a powerful redaction tool that allows you to completely remove a word, a string of words, or even whole pages from a document for privacy or security reasons. Use pattern search to immediately find then redact instances of Social Security Numbers, bank account details, phone numbers, and more.

You can also indicate the reason for redaction by including plain text or specific redaction codes used by various government bodies. Your custom text or a code acts effectively as a stamp over the blanked redacted area.

3. Create PDF/A files for archiving and court filing

PDF/As are PDFs that meet ISO and filing compliance standards required for long-term preservation when archiving. It is also the preferred or required format when filing with many legal and government organizations.

The PDF/A standard, at a minimum, requires for a document to be:

• Self-contained - The PDF must embed all required legal (rather than local/system) fonts needed to render/print it.
• Self-documenting - The PDF must embed all metadata using XMP to ensure future readers’ understanding of it.
• Device-independent - The PDF must reliably be able to be printed consistently on any hardware/software platform.
• Unfettered - The PDF must be accessible to anyone on any software, i.e., contain no encryption, security, or open passwords

pdfDocs allows you to save a PDF according to the following PDF/A conformance levels: PDF/A-1a; 1b; 2a; 2u; 3a or 3u.
In brief, the:

• PDF A-1 format doesn’t allow attachments to be included at all
• PDF/A-2 format requires that all the attachments be PDF/A-2
• PDF/A-3 format is standard for creating Binder Projects as it will enable non-PDF attachments to be included
  
  

4. Manage file sizes with PDF optimization

Basically, optimization means reducing PDF file size through compression or file splitting. This applies to documents in both Single Document Mode and Organizer Project Mode.

Compression

In most cases, the default optimization settings pdfDocs ships with are appropriate for minimizing file size. However, you can modify the settings to reduce files even further using the following methods:

• Compression: by zipping images (working best on large areas of single colors) or converting images to JPEGs (which reduces file size more than zipping but also reduces image quality).
• Downsampling: by removing pixels from an image (per average, bicubic, or subsampling options) and averaging the pixel data over the whole image area.
• Subsetting fonts: by removing all fonts not used in a document.
  
  

Both compression and downsampling can be used to PDF images, but only compression can be used on vector graphics, i.e., text and line art.

File splitting

pdfDocs automates the file splitting process, so you don’t have to manually select pages and save them separately. Simply open your PDF in Single Document or Organizer Project Mode and navigate to Save As or Share and expand the Split & Extract options.

Choose between four options, including splitting at a specific page number, per a select number of pages, at every x megabytes, or by top-level bookmarks.

5. Automatically generate Bookmarks in PDFs converted from Word

Bookmarks are the list of hyperlinked Headings in a document that provides an alternative to using a Table of Contents when navigating between the different sections.

pdfDocs will automatically create Bookmarks based on the headings in your document when you convert from Word. You can view and interact with the Bookmarks in the Navigation pane.

6. Make scanned files editable with in-built text recognition

Scanned documents are often stored as image-based PDFs, which lack editable text. Worst case scenario is you would have to recreate the document in Word or the original authoring application. With pdfDocs in-built OCR tool, you can automatically recognize text in scanned documents and create a text layer ready for editing and searching.

7. Automate document scanning with Watch Folders

Watch folders allow image files and other supported file types to be automatically converted to PDFs. Files can be manually dropped into your pdfDocs Watch folders or be configured to automatically receive files from a scanner.

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