Is there an easy way to share custom Acrobat stamps?

June 30, 2008 6:16 AM

Adobe Acrobat Professional (8.0): Is there any way to distribute stamps from one machine to another? How about simply sorting them?

I teach online and convert student papers to PDF because I like Acrobat's comments and markup tools (especially the Text Edits, Sticky Note, Stamps, and Underline Text Tool). I have a custom set of stamps that I created to mark common problems in papers I grade.

My problem is twofold: I grade on more than one machine and I would like to make these stamps available to other instructors. But I can't find an easy way to move the entire set of stamps from one machine to another. Acrobat's import feature lets you bring them in one at a time, name them, and assign them to a category, but that's a slow process. I can't even figure out how to sort them so they show up alphabetically by name.

I've sometimes resorted to importing each stamp graphic and naming it manually. But there has to be a better way.

posted by wheat to computers & internet (2 comments total)

It looks like they're all saved in C:\Documents and Settings\[USERNAME]\Application Data\Adobe\Acrobat\8.0\Stamps. I haven't tried it, but maybe you could copy the contents of that folder over to the other computer?
posted by Partial Law at 7:09 AM on June 30, 2008

I'll give that a shot. On my main box, that directory contains one PDF, with what seems like a randomize name (WhCcTqkxZ40ZxWmYfQjejB.pdf). I cranked it open. The first page is blank. But each of my custom stamps is there, one per page, starting at page two. Since each stamp is a single page, I tried sorting the pages (leaving the blank one as page 1, since I'm not sure what it does). And the new sort order was reflected in the stamp palette (following a restart of Acrobat).

So, you've solved one of my problems. But I can't figure out where Adobe stores the metadata about the individual stamps (i.e. their names). I found the category title. It's the same as the "Title" value in the PDFs Document Properties.

I'll try copying that file to a different machine and see if the stamps get populated. If that works, I'll call it a success.
posted by wheat at 8:44 PM on July 1, 2008