How To Apply a Stamp To a PDF On Your Mac

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to apply simple stamps to any PDF document.

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So I've gotten a few requests recently for a way to apply a stamp to a pdf document. A stamp would be something like Approved, Declined, or Verified. Something like that.  Usually in a different color. Usually with a border around it or something. It's fairly easy to do that using the MarkUp tools in Preview. You don't have a lot of flexibility. If you want to have a stamp that has a graphic in it like a corporate logo or something like that then it's going to be a little tougher. But you can create a simple stamp that you could use in Preview and other places as well and copy and paste it into documents as you need it.

So here's what we're going for. A simple stamp like this that goes on top of any pdf that has a word in it. It's pretty easy to create this and then apply it to a pdf. So let's start from scratch here. I'll get rid of that and let's say this is a pdf that I need to apply a stamp on. So we're going to create it from scratch. But after we create it from scratch you'll see that we can use it pretty easily. So you don't have to create it from scratch a second time on another pdf document. 

The first thing we're going to do is go to the MarkUp tools which is this button right here. Bring that up and then we're going to create a box. So I'm going to select this tool right here and select the regular box. I want to have a border around the box so I'm going to click here for a border. I'm going to make it red. You can use any color you like. Then I'm to make it a little thicker. So I'm going to choose a thickness here. You can see here I can choose whether to make it a smooth or rough. I like the idea of making it rough. You can make it dotted if you want as well. Rough line will be nice in that it gives you kind of a drawn look. 

Then I want to make it transparent in the middle there. So I'm going to click on the fill color and select this one right here which will make it transparent. Now I want to type some text in it. But fortunately boxes like this the MarkUp tools allow you to add text in them so I could do this all as one element. I don't need to make a box and a text box and have both things there. So I can double click on this now. Since I don't have anything in the middle here I need to double click on the border. When the hand cursor shows that mean I'm over the element so I can double click on it now and you could see a blinking cursor here in the middle. So now I could type something and I'll put a little exclamation point after it.

Select it all, Command A, and I'm going to go to this tool here to change the font. I could change it to whatever I want. Just pick a font that you like. I could increase the size to something and I could change the color. I want to make it the same color red to make it look like it's coming from the same stamp. You know the same ink color. So now that I've got that I'm going to adjust the size of this box to fit the text better. So I'm going to grab a corner here and adjust it. Do something like that. I think that works really well. So now I have a little stamp there that I can move around and place where I want.

Now as an extra bonus let's rotate it a bit so it stands out more. Now unfortunately the only way to rotate elements like this in Preview is if you have a trackpad which most Mac users do. Anybody with a MacBook obviously has a trackpad and that's a majority of Mac users. Hopefully if you have an iMac or some other desktop Mac you're also using a trackpad. You can use two fingers and twist to rotate this with it selected. So I can rotate it just a little bit like this. Then once it's rotated I can put it where I want and I have my desired effect. 

Once I have this I could select it and Command C to copy it  and paste it into another document. So let's go and open another pdf here. Just open up this sample letter and if l do Command V to paste it appears there. I don't even have to turn MarkUp tools on first. Now I can move that around and place it where I want. So it could just be a matter of opening up a previous document where I used the stamp and then copying it and pasting it into a new document. It's still live active text here so I could now change the text very easily and just go on a case by case basis of what this text is. I could even use this to put a date in here. So I can stretch this and make it a little bit longer and then include a date like that. I know a lot of times when we use stamps we want to include a date with them. 

If you want you can create a Preview document that just contains a stamp or a bunch of different stamps to make it easy to access. A quick way to create a blank pdf to store some stamps is just go into Pages. Create a blank document here. Convert it to Page Layout so it doesn't even have body text in it. Then go to File, Export to PDF. Save that out as a file. Just call it like Stamps. I'll put it here on the desktop temporarily. I'll Quit Pages and I've got the Stamps.pdf here. Open that up and it opens up in Preview. Just blank. I can paste in my stamp there. Save it. Now I've got that stamp. So next time I want to use it on something all I need to do is open the Stamps.pdf there. I can select this. Copy it and Paste it into any document I want.

The cool thing about this is that you can use it anywhere that you use MarkUp tools. For instance here I am in Mail. Let's say I get a pdf in an email. I want to reply and that pdf is going to be included in there. But I want to stamp it as approved. So you can see here when I move my cursor over the pdf I get the ability to go into MarkUp tools by clicking this button here. So I go to MarkUp and now I'm still in Mail but I'm marking up this pdf. I can double click on my Stamps.pdf here. It opens up in Preview. I can select  that stamp and Command C to copy. Go back to Mail here where I'm still in the MarkUp tools and Command V to paste. You can see the stamp appears here inside of Mail. So I can position it where I want. Hit Done and there you can see the stamp is now applied to that copy of the pdf. It's just here in Mail. I can send it with that stamp on it.

Now there are tons of third party pdf tools that you can get and some of those have stamps in them as a feature. So you can create more complex stamps. You can use transparent images as stamps. So if you really need to use this a lot and in special ways you may want to look into getting a third party pdf tool. But this will work for most users and it's fairly simple, and quick, and it works with what you already have on your Mac.