Stamper Tool

The Stamper tool is a very handy utility tool that has been added to Hero in v4.0.

The tool allows users to quickly and efficiently locate and stamp the NatHERS Certificate Stamp onto their architectural plans without reverting to third-party tools, saving you time and streamlining your workflow.

The Stamper Tool located on the Main Toolbar includes a number of handy ways of locating and resizing the Stamp to fit the architectural documentation, including a very useful "Fit to Whitespace" button.

Set up the files to stamp, position your stamp and then hit "Save to PDF" to create a stamped drawing set in seconds!

See below for full details:

1 - Setup Section

The setup section along the left side of the Stamper Tool holds all the settings to perform a Stamp.

2 - Preview

The preview section shows the current page and current page stamp location of what the Stamped Drawing set will look like.

3 - Stamp Location

The Stamp will be shown on each page at it's the final size, position and rotation. You can drag the Stamp with the mouse to move it around to the best position. Note, once you've dragged the Stamp it will no longer follow the Preferred Position or Margin settings.

4 - Current Page

The Preview shows each page of the File to Stamp.

5 - Stamp File

Select the NatHERS Stamp PDF file downloaded from the Hero Web-Portal (or try anything you'd like to overlay onto the PDF such as specification tables etc!)

6 - File to Stamp

Select the PDF file you'd like to Stamp upon such as Architectural Drawing or Specification PDFs.

7 - Output Directory & File-name

Select the folder where the stamped drawing set PDF will be created, and then enter the final Stamped PDF file name (or leave the defaults settings as-is).

8 - Stamp Size

Resize the NatHERS Stamp to fit the drawings as desired by entering the percentage or dragging the size slider.

9 - Stamp Preferred Position

The Stamp can be positioned in a default location across 10 grid locations of the Drawings such as Top-Left Corner, Centre-Right to suit the Drawing set.

10 - Stamp Margin

You can set the X & Y Margins which determine how far away from the edge of the page the Stamp will be located, so that you can locate the Stamp to suit.

11 - Stamp Rotation

If the Drawing set has rotated pages, you can also rotate the Stamp to align with the Drawings by selecting 0, 90, 180 or 270 degree rotation.

12 - Move all on Mouse Drag

This setting determines whether a mouse-drag on the Stamp in the Preview area will move the Stamp location for only the current page or for all pages. If you'd like to position just a single page location, turn this setting off, otherwise turn this setting on so that a mouse-drag will effect the preferred stamp location for all pages.

13 - Fit to Whitespace

This super handy button will automatically calculate the optimal position for the Stamp to Fit into Whitespace, and avoid overlapping data, text or graphics on the underlying Drawing PDF. It will begin the search in your current preferred position and then continually search until the position is clear of intersections of the underlying Drawing PDF information.

Note there are some limitations on this feature as this calculation will sometimes encounter issues particularly on PDFs where the PDF page is just a single vector image rather than containing actual PDF data and therefore may not suit all cases. You may be able to request your client to export the CAD drawings to PDF in a more suitable format for stamping for regular jobs to avoid this issue, or simply manually locate the stamp position.

14 - Save to PDF

Click the Save to PDF button to finalise the creation of the Stamped PDF file.

15 - Open file after creation

Check this setting to automatically open the stamped PDF after creation or not in your desktop default PDF viewer.

16 - Page Selector

Select the current page, each page has a different stamp location that may be overridden if manually dragged by the user.

17 - Delete Page

If there is a page in the Drawing set that you would like not included in the final Stamped drawing set (such as joinery or fixture schedule pages not relevant to the energy-rating) you can mark Delete Page. 

Troubleshooting the Stamper

If you encounter issues with the Stamper, please try the following:

• The PDF to stamp file may have been printed at an incorrect page-size (e.g. "letter" instead of "A3"). You can try re-printing the PDF to Stamp file to PDF again and re-creating a new PDF to Stamp file and try loading this file into the Stamper, and trying again. This has succeeded in rectifying issues where no stamps were appearing on the final file.
• If encountering stamping issues for a PDF with multiple pages of different orientation, rotation or page-size (eg A3 with A1), you may want to try splitting the file into single new PDFs where all pages are the same rotation or page-size etc.