Acrobat automation for batch processing of files

[DigiCorn]

We have a legal team that needs documents printed from time-to-time. It's not often, but when they need stuff, they need it before now. Monday they brought in close to 50,000 documents spread out over several thousand files they need printed ASAP. They added Bates Numbering to all their documents for reference... problem is, they way they did it, they added 1/4" to the bottom of every sheet (or to the left and right on landscape documents) and some of the stuff mixed in is 17 x 11, and it has the same problem. All the page geometry is set to letter or ledger size, so when it goes through the RIP, the numbering gets cut off.

Prisma has the ability to batch resize all the 8.5 x 11.25 and 17.25 x 11 (or 17 x 11.25) documents to proper size, but with the Acrobat art/trim box set to cut off the numbering, it's still a problem that has to be fixed. On top of that, the legal team markups up their pdfs using Acrobat highlighter tools and markups.

Since I don't have PitStop, I use PDF fixups. I wrote one fixup to first strip the document of all it's page box designations, so that it technically has no page boxes. Then I wrote a second fixup to add the page boxes back in as defined by the page size. I wrote a third to "flatten" the highlighting and markups (because the RIP strips those off too).

The way we sometimes fix this is to "print to Microsoft PDF" and select the dropdown tool for "print document and markups," but if you have multiple page sizes within the same document, it makes them all one size only, and there's no work around for that. It's also a pain to open each document, run fixup a, fixup b and then fixup c, save, close and open the next one.

I figured this out. If you export the fixups as profiles, and then reimport them to a custom profile, you can create an action that runs the fixups in your predetermined order and then add a save command. Basically, you open the first file, and then open the action panel. From here you can select multiple files (I tested it with the first 50) and it will run them all (in the background, too so you can work on other stuff). It took about 10 minutes to process the first 50, but a lot of those were single pagers. I have 950 more to go in this one folder, but so far it's working, and a huge stress/time saver.

[born2print]

Be careful about scaling legal documents. I am no expert and I don't know the rules, but I do know that I had a notary that had to come have us sign a big pile of documents a second time because the first time some legal size docs were output scale to fit on letter and apparently that was a big no-no.

[DigiCorn]

This is a special case. The legal team doesn't like reading electronic documents, so they want a hard copy. What they get, is what they get. If/when this ends up in a court, it won't be nearly as many pages, and it will be exact.