What can you do with pdfToolbox's 'Decorate' feature?

06 März 2019 By Akash Choudhary

Support pdfToolbox Switchboard callas products

The Switchboard Actions under 'Decorate' let you place a range of different object types or even pages within a PDF. But where do you find the 'Decorate' group. In pdfaPilot or pdfToolbox's standalone edition, you can open the Switchboard via Tools > Switchboard in the menu or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd+2 (Windows: Ctrl+2). Amongst other groups like Arrange (all about Imposition), Standards (PDF standards compliance), Prepress, Layers, Fonts etc, you will find the Decorate group.Introduced in pdfToolbox 10.1, Decorate features let you:

  • Place folding marksAdd Text: Decorate
  • Place Text
  • Place Page number
  • Place Date
  • Place Logo/Image
  • Place Watermark
  • Place Mail stamp
  • Place Letter background
  • Add summary page
  • Add divider page
  • Move objects
  • Add empty pages

Let's just take one example and see how these Actions work.

Add text

The “Add Text” Action lets you place text on a page (quite obvious, isn't it?). All you have to do is:

  • Enter the text to be placed
  • Define text size, rotation and color
  • Define the position where the text is to be placed under 'Placement'. Interesting here is the 'Mouse selection', where the dimensions of the region can be specified using a mouse, very much like inserting a 'Text box' in Microsoft PowerPoint, for example
  • Define Offset (relative to Placement)
  • If the text doesn't appear on the page, enlarge page
  • And finally, define the page range, in case it is a multi-page document that you are dealing with

And voilà! The result will then be shown in the visualizer.

Batch functionality

This is something that has come up quite a lot of times in support, where customers were unaware about the possibility of Batch Processing. pdfToolbox or pdfaPilot Desktop can do more than just checking or fixing one file at a time; the Batch Processing mode allows it to process multiple PDF documents within a folder. The Switchboard allows you to apply any Action to all PDF files (up to 100 documents one after another) within a given folder.

Depending on the processing results, the files will then be stored either in a folder containing successfully processed (Success folder) or unsuccessful results (Failure folder).

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