How to flatten a PDF that has text boxes added to it.

[tuqqer@adobeforums.com]

I have figured out how to add some text to a PDF via Acrobat Professional 6.0 for Macintosh. (I'm on a G5, 10.3.5)

I now want to "flatten" the PDF; in other words, make it so that anyone who opens my doc with Acrobat Reader won't be able to click on the added text box.

I've tried doing Save As..., saving as a PS doc and converting that via Acrobat Distiller. Still, Reader allows me to click on each added text box.

[Garrett_Cobarr@adobeforums.com]

tuqqer, you may be misunderstanding what flattening means...you can flatten layers into one and you can flatten transparency but neither of these processes will have any effect on form fields that that add to your PDF in Acrobat.

Explain what you mean by "click on". Are you trying to stop the user from being able to change text in the the form field? Or are you trying to stop the highlites from taking place when the mouse cursor rolls over the field?

Tell me what you are trying to achieve and I'll respond.

[tuqqer@adobeforums.com]

Hey, thanks, Garrett.

Flatten isn't the right word... Here's what I do:

* * I open up an existing PDF in Acrobat 6.0 Pro
* * I create and add a text box of text, then close the PDF.
* * I then open this PDF with Reader. While I can't move the added text box, it does create a box around the text box when I click on it. In other words, it doesn't seem integrated into the whole PDF. It's the only thing in the whole file that does this. It seems awkward, and viewers will notice the change.

I'm trying to find a way where that added text box seamlessly blends with the PDF, unnoticeable to anyone viewing it.

[Garrett_Cobarr@adobeforums.com]

tuqqer, this is exactly what i thought you were talking about!

When I create, image based buttons for my PDFs I don't want some funky highlite line surrounding them. But I don't want to totally get down on this interface feature. it is there to draw attention to the active field, the field with focus. It is also an aid to the visualy impaired. But we don't need them so here goes...

First of all, you can locally control this effect from your Preferences. You need to uncheck the items, under the menus Acrobat > Preferences > Forms >Show focus rectangle and Acrobat > Preferences > Forms > Show background and hover color for form fields. But here is the caveat to this...when you send out the PDF it will be affected by what your end user has their settings set so you are going to need some JavaScript.

First you need to create a Document JavaScript. Under menu Advanced > JavaScript > Document JavaScripts... the document JavaScripts window opens. In the top line create a name, let name it, "docSettings", click the Add button, the JavaScript editor window opens, Copy the the script chunk below, delete everything in the window and Paste the script chunk in this window. Click the OK button.

global.highliteState = app.runtimeHighlight;
global.highliteColor = app.runtimeHighlightColor;
global.formFocus = app.focusRect;

if (app.runtimeHighlight == true) {
app.runtimeHighlight = false;
}
if (app.focusRect == true) {
app.focusRect = false;
}

When your end user opens your PDF the script is doing 2 things: the if statement is seeing if the runtimeHighlight is currently on and turns it off and because this process changes your user's Preferences, it stores the settings in a Global variable and returns the original settings to them when they close the document.

Now the final step...under the menu Advanced > JavaScript > Set Document Actions..., that window opens, select Document Will Close and click the Edit... button.
Paste the script below in this window and click OK.

app.runtimeHighlight = global.highliteState;
app.runtimeHighlightColor = global.highliteColor;
app.focusRect = global.formFocus;

delete global.highliteState;
delete global.highliteColor;
delete global.formFocus;

You will notice that the first part of this script is in reverse of the earlier script because it is returning the preference settings to their original settings from the Global variable storage. After it does that it deletes the Globals, good memory housekeeping. This all happens just before the PDF closes.

Quit Acrobat and save the document.

Open Adobe Reader and set the preferences that I had mentioned earlier to what you don't want, close them and then open your PDF. Not only will you not see the effects you find undesirable gone but if look at the prefs you will see them off. Now close the PDF and look at the prefs again, everything is back to how your virtual end user had it set up in the first place before opening your PDF.

[tuqqer@adobeforums.com]

Holy moly. This is amazing, that creating a flat PDF doc after adding text to it requires this many steps. One would think that this is one of the main reasons for owning Acrobat: to be able to make changes to a PDF and have it appear exactly like a normal PDF.

Many thanks for taking the time to do this explanation. I tried it, and may have screwed something up; the boxes still changed the cursor to a arrow when hovered over, and they still highlighted a box around them when clicked. But, no matter. As I was thinking about how I used to make changes to PDFs, it occurred to me that I still could do this. So, I opened up the PDF in Photoshop. I selected the two pages that had the text boxes, one at a time. I then saved those pages on my desktop as PDF files, page 1 and page 28. I then opened up the PDF in Acrobat, deleted those pages, and added the Photoshop-made versions. Voilà, the pages are now flat.

Again, thanks for these suggestions.

tuqqer

[Aandi_Inston@adobeforums.com]

You can flatten a form with a single JavaScript statement. That sounds
an awful lot quicker than using Photoshop, which will also
ruin/degrate/bloat many PDFs.

Aandi Inston

[de_Siem@adobeforums.com]

"One would think that this is one of the main reasons for owning Acrobat: to be able to make changes to a PDF and have it appear exactly like a normal PDF. "

One would think wrong if one would be to think along those lines.

From what you are saying it looks like you are using the text box commenting tool. As the name implies this will add a box.
However you can set the properties of the textbox tool, provided you have the (context sensitive) propeties bar open. Do this by hitting the apple-E keyboard shortcut, or ctrl-click on an empty space in the toolbar.

Select the textbox tool, set the properties (no fill and a zero point border) then type the text. Still it's an added comment which needs to end user to select an option in the print menu inorder to print the comment out.
To avoid this you could then re-distill the pdf.

Another option would be to ctrl click in the pdf using the text touchup tool.

[Barbara_Shaw@adobeforums.com]

I agree. It sounds like all you need to do is create a pdf of the pdf file (the file with comments) and it is a flattened file with the text comment incorporated into the file.

[Unregistered]

agreed, it's pretty absurd that this feature is not front-and-center in Adobe Acrobat.
I have this exact problem, I use a downloaded PDF creator (CutePDF) which works as a 'printer'-driver.

Then in my Adobe Acrobat after making my text box additions, I go to File>Print> and select the CutePDF 'printer'.

This creates a new PDF file with the text boxes merged into the rest of the PDF Features. Just make sure to give it a new file name otherwise it overwrites your original file.

[Unregistered]

For those with acrobat, simply print to PDF ensuring that you are printing "Document and Markups". You'll have a new pdf file with the text box text blended in.