Bates numbering for carbonless paper

[Enachi]

Hi guys,

I've recently received this task, to generate carbonless books for our company. I've received from my supplier the carbonless paper, 4 colors per set, in boxes of 500 sheets. I'm using a Ricoh C751.

The issue I have is regarding the bates numbering for the paper. Obviously, I need to get the same bate number on each set of 4 sheets, and this number should increase for every each 4 pages. I've looked for a solution in Adobe Acrobat Pro and InDesign but I couldn't find any solution for this.

The other way would be to create bates numbers in Acrobat Pro, like every page numbered, and send this to the printer and print every color individually (that requires boxes of carbonless paper in individual colors) and mixed them somehow..but it would be a pain.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[dabob]

You could use data merge in indesign - just make a database with repeating #s in 4 row increments basically just a simple variable data job

 

[kyle]

You could make a separate pdf document for each of the four parts, sequentially number each one, save them as e.g.: A.pdf B.pdf C.pdf and D.pdf. Then extract all pages as individual files for each of the four numbered PDFs into a common directory. Then combine all the single page PDFs into one file. Acrobat should order them alphanumerically, which would be in the correct order if you have Acrobat XI (watch for, e.g. A 10.pdf ordered before A 2.pdf with earlier versions).

 

[kyle]

Nevermind - that wouldn't work! You would get all of the pages from the A document, then B, etc. I use the mmv command line utility (which doesn't come with OS X or Windows) when doing this sort of thing to swap the filename parts.

You could probably use the "split document" command, and set the maximum pages per document to one (it's options allow you to put the number before the original document name).

 

[pdan]

Actually this can be done with a single number column. 4 page ID document with the same <<field>> on all four pages; maybe a four page document with the data field on the master page. (Tested, yes. 4 page data merge with variable on the master)

For this single position number there is an article at InDesignSecrets.com using a page number rather than Data Merge. (Most of my numbering is "cut stack" jobs where there are multiple up, printed than cut which prohibits the page number technique; I use multi column data sources)

I would suggest sending the static form as a Print Master to the Ricoh's RIP (VDP tab) and only sending the numbering to reduce file/spool size.

 

[Steve0]

Quite Imposing Plus (a plug-in for Acrobat) would do this easy.

You can use QIP to "Stick on Text & Numbers" to stamp numbers on the pages of the document.

Then you can use QIP's "Page Tools" to duplicate each page x number of times (in your case, 4 times), with Collate set to "No," so that you end up with the pattern: 0001, 0001, 0001, 0001, 0002, 0002, 0002, 0002, 0003, 0003, 0003, 0003, and so on.

QIP's limitation is (a) it has a very limited font selection for stamping text and numbers, and (b) it's not cheap.

There's a much less expensive plug-in from Appligent, called StampPDF, that can stamp the numbers on (with a richer feature set than QIP), but I don't think it can duplicate the pages for you. But maybe it can stamp four pages for you before incrementing (I took a quick look and didn't see it). You might want to check it out (they have a free trial).

 

[Stephen Marsh]

One can manually duplicate a small amount of pages by alt/opt dragging a page in the page thumbnail panel on the left hand side of the Acrobat window.

One can also add Bates numbering using Acrobat Pro.

If you require say 4 numbers x 100 sheets, then this is going to get tedious. I don’t know of any automated way to dupliate pages, short of duping files and combining files.


Stephen Marsh

 

[Enachi]

Guys, thank you for all the info. I've looked deep into your advises and frankly, I've ended up with such an easy solution
Having a one bates numbered document opened in Adobe, simply extract it as individual pages. Once that is done, I went into the adobe folder where my documents have been extracted, selected all and and copy-paste them as many times as I needed (4 in my case). Doing this, the documents have been arranged by name, meaning that after each original page there have been put the duplicates.After that the only thing I had to do was to combine them into a single PDF. Job done

 

[bjprntg]

There is a much simpler way to do this. In InDesign create a document with say 500 pages (number of finished sets you need). Go to the master page and insert a marker for the page number. Print the entire doc 4 times and make sure it is set to group not collated. Your job is completed!

 

[jokar]

I have been using a little program called Number Press for numbering my NCR jobs on a Ricoh Pro 1107ex. It cost less then $80 and quite easy to use.