It is used by lawyers to create an official record of every document (converted to PDF) in a court case.

If there are two pdfs in the official record and the first pdf has 3 pages and the 2nd has 4 pages the bates numbering might start with AR 0001 and and with AR 0003, then the 2nd pdf would begin with AR 0004 and end with AR 0007.   Any citations from the official record will include a reference to the bates number to make it easy for the Judge, the opposing side and any future, interested parties, to find citations.

The name comes from a mechanical stamp that used to be used to stamp pages filed with the court. The Bates Stamp  company made a stamp.

This Wiki article explains the history.

My research tells me that simply writing text on a page using Drawtext function is not a perfect way to Bates Stamp a pdf. Why? Because the text on the pdf is changed.   The Adobe Standard (which I am only just learning) says the best way to designate extra data on a pdf (background data) is to use what Adobe calls an 'artifact'.  I have seen artifacts used for Bates Stamping by third party software and that is what I'd like to be able to do myself programmatically.

Foxit (and Debenu)'s Aerialist product Bates Stamps PDFs and there are many free and inexpensive programs that do this. I am licensed to use two different programs that Bates Stamp pdfs, but neither is perfect and I'd like full control over the process.

I also believe the Bates Stamping process has other business value for marking documents at the end of a fiscal year.

If Debenu SDK needs to be enhanced if it doesn't support objects.  Why buy (or upgrade) if Debenu only gets you 1/2 way there?

To do this without Debenu's SDK, I need to have a better understanding of Adobe's PDF Standard.

I hope this helps.

Ken

I am trying to add Bates Numbering to pre-existing PDFs using an 'accepted' technique. 

I was somewhat successful using the DrawText function, however, this doesn't give the same result as bates numbering if added using a few commercial apps that I can use.  Extracting pagetext with debenu sdk omits the bates number if added with a commercial app. Extracting pagetext retrieves the bates number if DrawText is used.   Also, renumbering with drawtext does not erase bates numbering added with a commercial app, yet commercial apps appear to erase each other's bates numbers when run sequentially.

BTW: Bates Numbering means to add a sequential number, with our without prefix/suffix, to each page in a pdf. 

I used an editor to view bates stamped pdfs from two different commercial vendors and (although I am not an expert reading the internals of a pdf), I believe this is the bates stamp created for one page on one pdf.

Is there away to add this to a pdf with debenu sdk?  It appears the 'official' way to add a bates stamp is to add an /artifact to the pdf and then use /batesn.  This is what I suspect I need to add (bate's result is AR 00003828):

39 0 obj
<</BBox[0.0 -20.0 122.324 2.00012]/LastModified(D:20180623135541-07'00')/Length 156/Matrix[1.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.0 0.0]/OC 40 0 R/PieceInfo<</ADBE_CompoundType<</DocSettings 41 0 R/LastModified(D:20180623135541-07'00')/Private/BatesN>>>>/Resources 42 0 R/Subtype/Form>>stream
0 g 0 G 0 i 0 J []0 d 0 j 1 w 10 M 0 Tc 0 Tw 100 Tz 0 TL 0 Tr 0 Ts
BT
/Arial 20 Tf
0.25 0.330002 1 rg
0.001 -15.791 Td
(AR ) Tj
33.34 0 Td
(00003828) Tj
ET

endstream
endobj

I don't care about the last modified data, but found the bbox (bounding box), PieceInfo, BatesN items were used in two different commercial bates numbering programs.

I can add this myself (without debenu's sdk) if I understood a bit more about how to add an object with stream to a pdf using pdf syntax.

Can anyone help with this?

Thanks in advance.

Ken