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May 30, 2004

MacOsX: Print to PDF to make "commentable" pdf docs?

So I'm talking w/ Doc M about pdf files and commenting. "Oh, you can enable comments in PDF documents," I say. So we're doing tests now, using whatever JPL installed on his powerbook. (Adobe Acrobat Reader 6)

Here's what Acrobat's Help says,

In Adobe Reader, you can add coments only if the creator of the Adobe PDF document enabled commenting. If commenting is enabled, you can place comments anywhere in the cument, and you can determine the style and format of the document

How do I create PDF documents which enable commenting?

MacOS X has this lovely feature whereby you can print any document to a PDF file. We did a test out of MS Word print to pdf. Opened it up in Adobe Reader, looked at the Document Properties. This is what it said:

Document Security:

  • Security Method: No security

  • Can be opened by: All version of Acrobat

Document Restrictions

  • Printing: Allowed

  • Document Assembly: Not Allowed

  • Content Copying or Extraction: Allowed

  • Content Extraction for Accessibility: Allowed

  • Commenting: Not Allowed

  • Filling of form fields: Allowed

  • Signing: Not Allowed

  • Creation of Template Pages: Not Allowed

  • Submitting Forms: Not Allowed

So here's what I want to know: Is there any way inside MacOS X to change the default prefs for created pdfs to make Comments allowable? Can one hack the contents of the pdf itself to change that?

Macworld reviews of Acrobat 6.0 Standard and Acrobat 6.0 Pro state that

Reviewers must have Acrobat 6.0 Standard or Professional to read and annotate these files. (Adobe Reader can't even open them; its modest annotation tools can be used only by plain-vanilla PDFs.) When the reviewers have finished commenting, they export their annotations, which Acrobat sends back to you. [emphasis mine]

also, from Planet PDF on Adobe Reader 6.0:

Good news, bad news for Mac users. Long-time Mac users may well be disappointed with the lack of browser-integration for Acrobat 6.0 and Mac OS X which means that online commenting is off-limits for Mac users. But they'll be happy to see their old friend, Acrobat Search, back in action. But it gets worse for Mac classic users, they don't get any support at all.

Dang. I guess not. (Plus, the Adobe Acrobat Reader 5 for Linux doesn't allow commenting either). I'll check out what happens with an older copy of Acrobat that's on a computer elsewhere, to see if something works, but I'm guessing that Doc M can't create pdf documents using existing tools that'd allow his workgroup to comment on 'em--other than printout and paper scribbles.

May 30, 2004 at 02:31 PM in GeekTech |

Comments

Donald W. Larson

Susan,

If you have installed the Apple Developer Tools on your system, then perhaps the document, "About Quartz PDF Examples.rtf", may help point the way to the potential hack.

From that document, it appears the code involved would be part of the, "CoreGraphics" code.

Don

Posted by: Donald W. Larson | May 30, 2004 at 11:23 PM

Susan Kitchens

Thanks for that bit of info; I'll pass it on to "himself" and see how it goes.

S

Posted by: Susan Kitchens | May 31, 2004 at 04:11 PM

Greg

Has there been any progress on this? I just ran up against the same wall.

Posted by: Greg | March 23, 2005 at 05:33 PM

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