Date Stamp

Date Stamp 2.3 should work fine with Acrobat or Reader X/ XI/ DC as long as Protected Mode is turned off. Date Stamp checks and warns about this when Acrobat or Reader starts, but an earlier version of Date Stamp 2.3 failed to detect the problem so it could fail without telling you why.

If stamps are not working in Acrobat or Reader X/ XI/ DC or you have seen the warning that Date Stamp cannot work if protected mode is on, try the following in Acrobat or Reader (if you do not have administrator privileges ask an administrator to help):

Go to Preferences | Security (Enhanced) and select the button marked “Protected View Off” and also uncheck the box marked “Enable protected mode at startup”. Re-start the application.

Date Stamp 2.2 fully supports Acrobat and Adobe Reader X (version 10.*), although there was a printing problem with Adobe Reader 10.0.* so we recommend a minimum version of Adobe Reader version 10.1. For users on Windows 7 you additionally need to ensure that your system is fully updated and patched via Windows updates as Date Stamp fails to print on un-patched versions of Windows 7.

N.B. We were not able to determine which Windows 7 patch fixed the printing problem.

Acrobat and Adobe Reader versions 8.* had a printing fault affecting output to non-PostScript printers. This meant that Date Stamp only worked for PostScript printers with Acrobat or Adobe Reader versions 8.*. This problem was known by Adobe and was fixed in Acrobat 9. A patch version of Acrobat 8 was not provided.

We therefore recommend that existing or new customers continue to use Acrobat or Adobe Reader versions 7.* or earlier, or upgrade to Acrobat or Adobe Reader versions 9.* or later.

Start Adobe Reader (or Acrobat, depending on what you are using) and check that the Help | About Plug-ins | Date Stamp menu item exists. If it does, click on that menu item to check the version number, date, and serial number.

You can configure Date Stamp to print your own custom stamps by editing the dstamp.ini file, located in the same directory as the Date Stamp Acrobat plug-in, dstamp.api. Read the Date Stamp On-line Guide for details of how to specify stamps in dstamp.ini, and how to test them.

A stamp might not appear on printed output for several reasons:

• Date Stamp is not installed, or not configured correctly.
• The PDF contains a bitmap/scanned image covering the page (see next question).
• The PDF is within one of the excluded directories/URLs which you have asked not to be stamped.

Date Stamp may be installed on as many computers as your licence permits. However, it is not necessary to run the Date Stamp installer on every machine to do this.

We recommend that you install Date Stamp on a development machine and set up and test Date Stamp with a custom dstamp.ini file as required. Once you have done this you can create a simple script to install Date Stamp (e.g. from your site's login script). This is what you need to do:

• You need to install copies of dstamp.api and dstamp.ini into the Adobe Reader (or Acrobat) plug_ins directory on each machine.
• You also need to put some entries in the Windows registry. To do this, extract the existing entries from the following location to a “.reg” file and use that in your script. The entries can be found at:
  
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Merlin Open Systems\Date Stamp\<version number>
  
  The version number is in the form N.M, so could be 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 etc (only one digit after the decimal point).

Versions of Date Stamp prior to version 2.14 printed stamps as “watermarks” so a bitmap or scanned image will print over the top of it, thus hiding it. Date Stamp version 2.14 and later prints stamps as an overlay.

If you have this problem, we would recommend upgrading to the latest version.

If you cannot upgrade at present, try turning on the “overlay” and/or “clip” options for PostScript printing (see the Date Stamp On-line Guide for details). For non-PostScript printing you need to clip the PDFs in advance so that a white border is available for the stamp.