The Bates numbering system was invented by Edwin Granville Bates in 1895 as a way to index pages by adding running numbers to documents instead of having to manually write them down. This was particularly useful to legal communities at that time, especially when referring to large volumes of documents. This is an indispensable tool which was adopted by governmental departments and the medical communities. Over time, there are other automatic numbering self stamping machine from other manufacturers. 

In this modern age, most of our documents are digitally available typically in the form of PDFs. Adobe Acrobat supports Bates numbering in its application and now it is also available in Batch TIFF & PDF Converter.

The original Bates numbering machine is capable of handing 4 digit sequence from 0000 to 9999 and by convention, it is printed at one of the corners of the page.

In Batch TIFF & PDF Converter, the app offers between 4 to 12 digit numbers with the ability to tag them on the top left, top right, bottom left or bottom right. With modern Bates numbers, it offers the ability to include a Prefix and Suffix to the numbers.

Batch TIFF & PDF Converter originally offers Text Captioning which add text captions to the PDF as image representation which is not searchable. This is typically useful for adding copyright tags or titles to pages. Bates Numbers, on the other hand, are searchable text added to the PDF document which makes it easily searchable and indexable.

Bates Numbering is made simple with Batch TIFF & PDF Converter. It is found on the Bates Numbering tab. As with the other parts of the apps, you will first need to load the PDF documents you want add Bates numbering too.

Once you are done, there are some basic settings such as the Starting Running Number, No of Digits and the Alignment. You can even set the Font Type, Font Size and Font Color. The Font Type supported are the default PDF fonts which includes Courier, Helvetica and Times.

One interesting feature which is only available in Batch TIFF & PDF Converter is the ability to resize the content of the page so that the Bates numbers do not print over existing text, especially when the document does not have a large enough margin.

Under Page Manipulation, there are three options

  • None
  • Pad Bates Number Corner
  • Pad Corner & Keep Page Size

None works like other apps by just printing the Bates number on the selected corner without regard to whether there is any text there or not. Pad Bates Number Corner option will add a margin to print the Bates Number, which will increase the page height by the font height. Pad Corner & Keep Page Size option works like the prior option except that it does not increase the page height but rather shrinks the page contents to fit the Bates Numbers. Most of the time, the reduction in the content size would not be noticeable.

Batch TIFF & PDF Converter is available on our website or on the Mac App Store. It works natively on the Intel and Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 10.14 and above.