Part 2. History of a certain stamp or a sealing wax-scented PDF.

Today, I would like to show how we can “affix a virtual stamp” in the 21st century. The origins of sealing date back to the ancient times. In ancient Greece and Rome, they were used to secure correspondence and certify the authenticity of a will. Over the centuries, the function and the method of using a stamp itself have evolved. And paraphrasing the title of one of my favourite films, ‘Diamonds are forever’, I will say that stamps are also like this.

Together with Kamil, I would like to tell you about one of our ready-made tools, that is STAMPER, which helps our customers:

With the Expert’s eye:

Files with the PDF extension have dominated the IT world, and anyone with at least minimal contact with a PC has certainly come across them. With their advantages, PDFs have become the dominant file format with which we publish text and graphic information for a wider group of recipients. These files are also an integral part of many company and corporate processes in which documents, price lists, brochures, and many more items are published.

The lack of easy editing capabilities, which is an immanent feature of PDFs, is, on the one hand, a major advantage that keeps these files in a predefined layout regardless of the application in which they are opened, but it may also be a disadvantage when, for example, you want to quickly edit or provide a legend for the PDF contents. The most popular applications to view this type of files do not offer such features at all, or offer them to a very limited extent.

Fortunately, in 1996, Adobe Systems created a solution which partially responds to our needs. FDF files, which are simple text files, can be imported into the PDF to create an additional layer of easily editable objects.

At XELTO DIGITAL, we went a step further and prepared a solution that combines robotics and the capabilities of the FDF format. We created a product called STAMPER. It is a tool for sealing PDFs that can work independently, or it can be inserted into a larger process during which we would like the PDFs being processed to be appropriately marked. The stamps created by STAMPER are highly flexible. In addition to their contents, we can freely edit the attributes such as document coordinates, text size, font, colour, border, background, orientation.

With our solution, you can add extra information before printing an invoice, or mark the processed documents with an appropriate note. Using the STAMPER as part of the automation of office work opens up a lot of possibilities and makes it possible to clearly mark PDF files.

Author: Kamil Gawlista – RPA Developer