We use PDFClerk to add a multi-line footer that includes the page number, so we use the “Relabel Selected Pages” command (still using version 2.8.5 on MacOS 10.4.x for now).

See the attachment for the results of this. The only “problem” is that the “Label” field squishes the multi-line prefix and suffix together and makes a text mess. Not a big deal, as long as it works—and it does!

My questions today are:

1) is it possible to style the prefix and suffix text, i.e., we’d like to make one word in the prefix bold. It does not work to add standard HTML <b> tags, but I wondered if there is support for it in some other way.

2) is it possible to have certain other document constants available for use in this text, such as

(this is supported in a competing PDF “stamping” product).

Thanks for any help with the above questions, and thanks for a superb product!

Tony.

See the attachment for the results of this. The only “problem” is that the “Label” field squishes the multi-line prefix and suffix together and makes a text mess. Not a big deal, as long as it works—and it does!

Cool. I’m glad it works at all, as the feature wasn’t specifically designed for such elaborate prefixes/suffixes. I will look into cleaning up the display of the labels in the page list though.

1) is it possible to style the prefix and suffix text, i.e., we’d like to make one word in the prefix bold. It does not work to add standard HTML <b> tags, but I wondered if there is support for it in some other way.

There is no support for it currently, but I like the idea. Having said that, supporting this might become a bit tricky in the post leopard era, and it might be better to support such options through the watermarks feature. I’ll look into the possiblities.

2) is it possible to have certain other document constants available for use in this text

No current support for that either. But yet another good idea. You could, for the moment, probably use an applescript instead, to set the label for each page.

One thing I forgot to mention: the changes will be in PDFClerk Pro. I’ll have to see about post-fitting them to the legacy version.

And of course: scripting is only possible in PDFClerk Pro, so you couldn’t do that in PDFClerk 2.8.5.

Ok, I’ve been playing with this, and here’s what I think I can do in PDFClerk Pro (still need to see if I can and should make the same changes to the legacy version):

Both watermarks and page labels will be able to parse a number of variables and replace them with the respective values per page/document as appropriate.

Labels remain ordinary strings for now, and can’t have any formatting other than font and size applied to the whole string.

Watermarks have always had the ability to use RTF documents as their source, so you could, say in TextEdit, create a small document with the desired text and formatting, including the appropriate variables where needed; save the document as RTF and use the resulting file as the source of a watermark. The rendered result on each page will be the same as when using labels (plus ability of formatting individual elements of the text), and (an added bonus to me), the page labels themselves do not need to be changed, which is better for navigating the document electronically. In addition, watermarks can be set to keep a tab on their source document and will dynamically update as the source changes, so you can adjust the source file and at the same time watch the results update in an open PDFClerk document.

In short: you wouldn’t be using formatting tags, but instead use a pre-formatted RTF document, and instead of labels you would use watermarks for the feature. If you need the text to be placed on opposite sides of facing pages you would use separate watermarks for even and odd pages.

These are the variables I plan on making available:
$title
$author
$subject
$pageNumber
$totalPages

Let me know what you think, and if there are other elements that would be useful to have available as variables.

Tonio - 04 October 2008 10:29 AM

Watermarks have always had the ability to use RTF documents as their source

That’s really useful to know ... and I will try this!

I am also familiar with AppleScript, so we will try using PDFClerk’s scriptable commands as we get to know it better.  For now, we are still finalizing the spec of what content goes where in the headers and footers.

Tonio - 04 October 2008 10:29 AM

These are the variables I plan on making available:
$title
$author
$subject
$pageNumber
$totalPages

Yes, excellent. There is generally a need for copyright information, but that is often included in the author string.

Thanks so much for responding, and we’ll be in touch as we continue using your product.