While attending my first PEPCON conference (now known as the CreativeProWeek conference) in Philadelphia, Kelly Vaughan shared a tip that changed the way I handled marked-up PDF alterations from clients. That tip was to take a PDF that had been marked up using Acrobat’s commenting tools into InDesign using the Annotations plug-in from DTPtools.

This was a huge improvement, compared to going back and forth between InDesign and Adobe Acrobat, especially in the days before second (or third) monitors became commonplace. It also came at roughly the same time that a user interface change in Adobe Acrobat meant I could no longer move my commenting panel around and it was fixed to the right hand side. I’d liked the ability to move the commenting panel so much that I wrote a post about it.

Since CC 2019, the InDesign team have added an almost identical feature to InDesign – it is Import PDF comments.

Unlike the annotations plug-in, the feature will only work on PDFs made in Adobe InDesign CC2019 and up.

The user interface has a similar look and feel compared to the Annotations plug-in.

However, I still pay the little extra for the additional subscription to DTPtools as I find their plug-in easier to work with, especially when having to replace large blocks of text.

Regardless which version of the comment import was being used, this made the back and forth of PDF proofing – known as round-tripping – better in many ways. When marked up correctly, alterations:

• appeared in the correct place and were taken in with an ‘accept’ mouse-click, rather than hunting an alteration down (e.g. fourth paragraph, second line, remove the word ‘the’);
• weren’t misunderstood or misread due to poor handwriting or quality of the copy being provided;
• could be conducted by many authors or stakeholders reviewing the same PDF, or copies of the same PDF but with the comments combined in Acrobat;
• were done efficiently, quickly and accurately.

With this in mind, my employer at the time tasked me to make a video and tutorial on how to use this system so that we could take advantage of this workflow.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it mark up a PDF properly

That said, no matter how foolproof a system can be made, nothing is ever foolproof.

There is a previous Colecandoo article that touches on some of the issues with PDF round-tripping, but in this article I’d like to go into more depth about how to take a robust round-tripping system and throw several spanners in the works.

Bubble town, duelling banjos or being vague

Take the following example of a markup.

This time, instead of using the strikethrough or text replacement commenting tools, the author has instead used nothing but sticky notes. This isn’t catastrophic, but does slow down any productivity that could have been made if the client had keyed in the alteration using the text replacement tool that could be accepted or rejected.

• The first note indicates to remove, but what – the ellipsis, the line, what?
• The second note then has a little more information telling us to remove ‘once or more’, but the alteration is at the end of the line, not near the start of the note.
• The third note is again subjective, so will have to be marked for later discussion with the client, but the fourth note definitely is – ‘I think this is wrong’. Is that a note to me, another author, or themselves? I’m only taking in the changes – I don’t know what needs to be done here, so again I need to mark this for later discussion with the client.
• The fifth note says ‘this is spelled wrong’ but instead of typing the word correctly as a note, they took more time, effort and letters to tell me it is incorrect as if to be punitive.
• The last note too is ambiguous – what do you want me to swap – the descriptions, the subjects, or both?

Simply put, these markups have not been well composed, and certainly haven’t taken advantage of the strikethrough or text replacement tools.

Open the PDF in word and make the changes, then save the PDF back but say nothing

In this scenario, the client has sent me the PDF but when I go to take in the alteration, my plug-in displays an issue.

Upon closer inspection, I can see that the document looks… different.

For example, the fonts aren’t right, the kerning is off, the bullets are wrong… and there are no comments in sight. The one thing I have noticed is that the content has changed.

I decide to check the document properties and it is here I discover what they have done.

The line “macOS Version 15.3.2 (Build 24D81) Quartz PDFContext” in PDF producer tells me that they’ve used something other than InDesign – presumably Word – to alter the PDF. If they had marked up the PDF I’d sent, the Application would have been Adobe InDesign CC 13.1 (this PDF was made a while ago) instead of being blank.

So in this circumstance, not only has the client not marked up the changes, they’ve made the changes themselves in Microsoft Word and sent a PDF back, so all digital integrity with the file I originally sent has been lost. My options now aren’t great:

• Ask the client to mark up the document I’d sent earlier as per the video instructions;
• Explain to the client the situation that the round-tripping cannot be performed but in order to salvage the situation, ask the customer what the changes are (hopefully there aren’t many);
• Compare the two files either using Acrobat’s compare files feature OR a dedicated application such as Global Vision comparison software. If either software isn’t an option, then do some painful, old-school proof-reading and hope that I take in the alterations correctly.

Making the changes in Acrobat using editing tools rather than commenting tools

In this scenario, the client has again sent me the PDF but when I go to take in the alteration, there are no alterations to take in.

Again under closer inspection, I can see that the document looks different, but only in that alterations have been made, but there are no markups made as comments.

In the properties window, I can see that the PDF has remained as a PDF and hasn’t been opened elsewhere for editing.

Is it possible that the client has made the changes in Adobe Acrobat itself? Well, yes, that’s what was done in this example.

In this instance, the client has gone to the Edit PDF button rather than the Comment button.

“But the free version of Acrobat doesn’t have an Edit feature” is likely what many readers are thinking at this point… but who said the client didn’t have access to the full version of Adobe Acrobat? The customer has and Adobe subscription, and with a full subscription comes access to applications such as the full version of Adobe Acrobat – not just the reader.

The full version of Acrobat now has editing tools that can be quite handy for last-minute edits. I’ll argue that the Acrobat plug-in Enfocus Pitstop Professional is still better for this task, but nevertheless the edits made to this PDF for this article were done wholly in Adobe Acrobat without the Enfocus plug-in.

As a side-note, when was the last time anyone downloaded the Adobe Acrobat reader, or instructed a customer to do so? PDFs are now ubiquitous and can be opened with any internet browser. The video detailing what to do did ask the client to use the Acrobat reader, but that doesn’t mean that they have.

Making artistic changes using the commenting tools

This was the subject of the previous Colecandoo post but the summary was that the client had taken in their own alterations rather than markups using a combination of the typewriter tool; the drawing tools and stamp tools that are all available from the comments. The article has workarounds for this depending on the complexity of the alterations made.

Marking up with tools other than Acrobat’s commenting tools; or using web services

In this example, the customer has sent me a PDF with two highlights in rather odd places.

I contacted the client and they asked whether I could also see the notes that were posted. I’d indicated that they hadn’t, but they were adamant that they had posted notes. Upon further discussion, it turns out they had used the Dropbox service, but rather than downloading the PDF to their own machine and making the markups in Adobe Acrobat, they made the changes using Dropbox’s own interface

This is further frustrating in that some alterations have come through such as the highlights, but others such as the notes have not.

What complicates matters further is that Dropbox isn’t considering the PDF just as a file to download, but is now offering users the ability to make changes while on the server.

To be clear, it is possible to open PDFs from Dropbox and make markups and save them directly from Adobe Acrobat, and this is done by adding Dropbox as a form of other file storage.

However, that is not how the markups in this example were taken in – they were taken in from the dropbox site using a combination of markups that the site provides.

If the customer has prepared hundreds of note style markups via Dropbox that have not become comments in the PDF itself, this will usually require going to the old-school two-screen method of taking in the alteration in InDesign on one screen and going to the alteration from the website on another.

Asking a client to mark up an entire PDF again -especially one that potentially had hundreds of alterations – isn’t fair on the client, especially if a sales representatives instructions were as vague as “We’ve uploaded the changes to Dropbox, just make your changes to that file and that’ll be fine”. It’s also quite dangerous if the client then misses a change and doesn’t realise their missed correction until after publication.

What about using Share for review?

Since June 2020 it has been possible to use an alternative round-tripping route that uses InDesign and a web browser, but skips PDF completely, and that is Share for review. It works by opening the InDesign file that you would like the client to review, and then by clicking the big blue Share button in the InDesign user interface. From here, a copy will be generated online and a URL will be provided that can be shared with the client. The client can then open this in most web browsers and make markups akin to those in Adobe Acrobat.

This screenshot shows markups that have been taken into the file via changes made from the website. This system has a lot of potential but isn’t there yet as the interface is much harder to use than the import PDF comments or the annotations plug-in. The button that looks like an ‘approve change’ button is actually a ‘resolve’ button and simply removes the alteration from the list, but doesn’t take in the change into the InDesign file. Clicking the ellipsis buttons gives you an opportunity to ‘dig in’ to retrieve the change to be made, but this is a lot of double-handling that would have worked better if it worked similar to the PDF round-tripping options of an accept/deny button.

If Adobe can iron out the kinks though, this will have major advantages, such as:

• No need for a client to have a PDF reader – just an internet browser;
• Markups can now potentially be taken in using portable devices such as smartphones and tablets;
• Not potentially handing over artwork that can then be manipulated and losing all digital integrity back to the original artwork that created it;
• Effective in realtime

Use what works for you

Despite the ways that PDF round-tripping can be circumvented, I still believe it is the most reliable way of taking in client alterations into native InDesign artwork. Without it, my previous team and I wouldn’t have been able to tackle the 250+ school diaries that had to be re-dated from the previous year to the upcoming year, and taking in any new content or design styles that were requested, especially in such a short time-frame.

I’m also hopeful that Adobe will keep improving upon the Share for Review feature as it has so much to offer, but at the moment PDF round-tripping has more working in its favour.