Monday, May 4, 2009

How to Flatten or Embed Comments in a PDF using Acrobat©

Most often than not, I implement all my comments to PDF files (such as manuscript proofs) using the many rich features of Adobe’s Acrobat Professional. However, I always prefer to “flatten” these comments that is, make them a permanent part of the PDF document. There are a few methods for doing this, but by far, the fastest and most clever is this one, found on PlanetPDF

  1. In Acrobat professional, type “Ctrl + j” to invoke the java script dialog
  2. In that dialog, type: this.flattenPages();
  3. press “Ctrl + Enter”

Voila!

Don’t forget to save your document.


Cite as:
Saad, T. "How to Flatten or Embed Comments in a PDF using Acrobat©". Weblog entry from Please Make A Note. http://pleasemakeanote.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-flatten-or-embed-comments-in-pdf.html

11 comments:

  1. Grand Merci de Tampa, Floride.... ça sauve beaucoup de travaille pour notre equipe! dogsintow@gmail.com

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  2. Excellent men thanks so much, now I need to figure out how to hack my blackberry hahaha thanks for share again.

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  3. After 20 mins look for this on the internet and getting no where, this tip worked perfect straight away and was easy to do. Thanks

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  4. Impressive and attractive posting. I enjoyed it. I think others will like it & find it useful for them. Good luck with your work
    I really like this tips, they help to use better the computer!

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  5. Thank you so much for sharing that tip! I have Acrobat 8 Pro so Ctrl-J didn't bring up the JS editor; it brought up the JS debugger. I had to go to Advanced, Document Processing, Edit All JavaScripts to load the editor, then I copied and pasted the script from step 2 there, pressed Ctrl-Enter, THEN it worked. Yay!

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  6. Wow, really cool! Thank you :)

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  7. Acrobat 9: From the Left Hand Navigation pane, click PAGES > Right click page thumbnail > select "Page Properties" > select "Actions" tab > From Select Action pull-down list, select "Run a JavaScript" > Click "Add" > Paste this.flattenPages(); in JavaScript Editor dialog box > Press "Ctrl+Enter"

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  8. It even works with my old Mac (just press Command-J instead of Ctrl-J). Many thanks!

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  9. Acrobat 10.1.10: Tools > Javascript .. Then when the Javascript panel opens > Set Document Actions. From there, I assigned the code to when the document is saved.

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