There are many phrases that customers can say to make prepress operators quite nervous, particularly the phrase “the alteration I made to the PDF has dropped off”. The first thought that goes through a prepress operator’s mind is “but I took that alteration in… didn’t I?”

Take the following flyer for example.

I’ve printed this before for the customer and fixed up a lot of their original artwork (Colecandoo Youtube Episode 14) but on this occasion they would like two amendments prior to reordering – seems they’ve moved out of the field and to a nearby cul-de-sac, so the map and address needs updating. The customer was kind enough to give me the new address that I can just re-key the type alterations into InDesign, but the customer has resupplied the PDF of the updated map with handy arrows as to how to get to their location, as well as added the logo and map pin.

That’s fine. After changing the address and masthead, I’ll move my copy of the logo and pin to the pasteboard and then take in the new map. I’ve made the client a PDF and sent it to them via email.

Hold up, wait a minute!

If you’re reading this and you’re saying “Why did you email this? The logo, arrows and instructions have dropped off the map” then you’re saying exactly what the customer said in a phone call moments later.

Opening up the PDF, it isn’t clearly obvious what could cause this. The layers panel in Acrobat is showing everything on the same layer.

When I open the output preview and change the Show dropdown to Not DeviceCMYK or Spot, the offending items that dropped off are remaining.

Usually this would mean that these graphics could be in RGB or LAB colours, but still doesn’t explain why they’d drop off of the PDF proof. Using the Enfocus Pitstop plug-in, I use the green arrow tool to click on the red arrow to see if it is RGB… but I can’t click on it, nor can I click on the ColeHealth logo.

Puzzled, I go to Enfocus Pitstop’s wireframe view to see if this helps any, but instead I’m puzzled even further.

In wireframe view, everything should go to black and white, but the offending graphics remain in colour. It’s at this point I look at the comment icon and consider “have they made these changes as PDF comments?”

You’ve gotta be kidding!

As it turns out, yes – they had made the alterations to the map using the commenting tools in Acrobat, specifically four arrow comments; a text box, and a stamp that was used to make the logo.

Right, so now I know why they dropped off, but how I now make these alts visible? Initially, I thought there were two options:

• Reset the artwork in my application of choice – in this case it would have been InDesign. However, this introduces a potential artwork cost; and also introduces any errors I might make in making the artwork.
• Render the map by way of a screenshot and replace the client’s amended PDF with the screenshot. Doing this now loses any crispness from the vector graphics and also loses the colour branding of the ColeHealth logo.

This can be fixed in other ways

Luckily, Adobe Acrobat’s own preflight tool has an option to flatten annotations. This can be done by opening the Preflight icon from the Print Production tools, and selecting the Flatten Annotations and Form Fields from the PDF fixups and clicking Analyze and fix.

After a prompt to resave the graphic, the comments disappear and all of the elements are part of the PDF – in this case, as vector graphics.

Likewise, if I was using Enfocus Pitstop, I could have gone to the Enfocus Action Lists and selected Flatten Annotations and clicked Run. The outcome is the same.

What was that about stamps earlier?

In this case, the customer had added their logo as a stamp, presumably because they didn’t have the appropriate tools to import the PDF graphic of their logo into the map. If you’ve not added a stamp before, this is done from the commenting tools.

It is then a case of linking to the graphic to be made into the stamp.

A wide variety of formats can be used, but for the demonstration I’d used a PDF.

The final part is to assign a category and give the stamp a name, and then click OK.

Luckily, because I’d supplied a CMYK PDF to the client and it’s the one they used as a stamp, flattening the artwork has resulted in the stamp returning to the colours that were in the original PDF.

Unfortunately, all of the other elements that were drawn with commenting tools alone are still RGB, so needs to be fixed using either another Acrobat preflight or Enfocus Pitstop action.

But no-one would do this in real life, right?

I’d like to think that no-one would do this, but unfortunately I’ve had three real-world instances at my last workplace:

• A real estate advertisement where the client had used the text box commenting tool to update an address directly over the top of the old address;
• A map where the client had gone to great lengths to add arrows to indicate the paths to the nearest fire exits; and
• A school diary where the customer added entire pages by inserting the new pages as stamps that were created from PDFs supplied to them.

So never use comments?

That’s not what I’m saying. Acrobat’s commenting tool is a great proofreading round-tripping feature when used appropriately, such as using the text addition, text strikethrough and notes comments appropriately. In conjunction with Adobe InDesign’s own Import PDF comments feature, (or my personal preference, the InDesign Plug-in from DTP Tools called Annotations) making authors changes can be a breeze.

However, the commenting tools are there to make comments that are taken in by another party, not for making hard changes to a PDF that only has the limited use of being a proof.