Protecting Comments From Flattening

[PHK]

I am a little unclear on how to protect Comments selectively from flattening and I think I need a bit of coaching on the subject.

I have, in the past on occasion, selected objects in the Content panel, copied them, and stamped them into another document that already had Comments. I wanted to flatten these Stamps to convert them to XForms on the target page by selecting the Stamps and Flattening them. However in some instances, all Comments were Flattened.

What I am doing now to prevent that from happening is that I change the Properties of the Comments I want to preserve as true Comments to the Printable option of "no." That seems to insulate those comments from the Flattening process. Is this the right thing to do? Or are there other, possibly better, ways?

Any thoughts will be much appreciated and I thank you in advance.

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

Hello, PHK

Unfortunately the only way to prevent annotations from being flattened, is to avoid using the "flatten all" function, and to ensure you have only selected the items you do wish to flatten when activating the "flatten selected" function.
Neither locking, nor setting a comment as "readOnly" via JS is able to prevent the flatten all action from converting a comment to base content.

Kind regards,

[PHK]

Hello, PHK

Unfortunately the only way to prevent annotations from being flattened, is to avoid using the "flatten all" function, and to ensure you have only selected the items you do wish to flatten when activating the "flatten selected" function.
Neither locking, nor setting a comment as "readOnly" via JS is able to prevent the flatten all action from converting a comment to base content.

Kind regards,

I am more than a little puzzled by what you write, Daniel. I thought the Flatten options were related to pages, without making annotation distinctions. See below. I agree neither locking nor "Read Only" preserves the object as an annotation, or comment, but setting the Printable option to "no", and choosing the Non-Printable sub-option of "Left as is" in the Flatten tool window as below seems to work for me. I do not see the "flatten all" function you mention, again see below.

image(1).png

But if your message is that there is no other way, I accept that.

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

Hello, PHK

My apologies, I misunderstood your mention of the "printable > no" option, as meaning you were already aware of this function, and that you were looking for other methods, without needing to change the options for handling printable items, possibly due to some personal reasoning. This is why my focus was on the lock and read only properties..

I see now that I was mistaken, but yes, the method you see there would be the only way.

Kind regards,

[PHK]

OK, thank you, Daniel. At least there is a way.

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

[Mathew]

I have, in the past on occasion, selected objects in the Content panel, copied them, and stamped them into another document that already had Comments. I wanted to flatten these Stamps to convert them to XForms on the target page by selecting the Stamps and Flattening them. However in some instances, all Comments were Flattened.

Maybe it's an issue with being able to reliably select only the elements one wants to flatten? Because right click on a selected group gives a menu with an option to flatten only the selection:

image.png

Often if there's a stamp with transparency or a polyline, it's difficult to select items around or behind it without also selecting that item. I did make a tool to hide comments on a page just for this purpose (it moves them off the page temporarily) viewtopic.php?t=40535

[PHK]

Yes, Mathew, I think you are correct. I have the "F" keyboard key set up to execute the Flatten command and my instinct is to hit F always when I intend to flatten which I do quite a bit as I love to copy XForms off downloaded pages and stamp them onto other pages (sheets) and then delete downloaded file. I do this to minimize exploding file counts (and page counts) by plastering these things onto large sheets. It is not unusual for me to have a 50- or 100-page document all condensed on to one sheet, and with annotations, and I rely heavily on Bookmarks to navigate content on the flattened sheet without disturbing or losing annotations.

I have used the specific comment command that you reference but, sometimes in my negilgence, I do not hence my initial post on the subject. I don't think I want to get into moving objects around with a special tool as it seems possible to exacerbate my error propensity. I tend to move objects whilst they are still Comments and then flatten to convert to content. Now that Daniel has confirmed my understanding I think I am happy with my approach above.

But thank you for devoting time and energy into helping with my mini-issue.

[Dimitar - PDF-XChange]