PDF XChange Forum

Hi forum and Tracker team,



At present, flattening Sticky Notes or Text Highlighters (actually any comment item that can contain comment text) only flattens the very item, but not the text contained inside, not even if the comment text bubble is open at the time of flattening.

Thank you very much for consideratioin!

Best Regards
David.P

Hi David,

Thanks for the suggestion. Seems like a reasonable one to me! I have placed an official feature request for this. As usual we cannot guarantee that the feature will be implemented, only that it will be seriously considered by our development team.

Cheers!

Thank you Patrick, for making this into an official feature request!
Looking forward to possibly seeing this feature in a future version.
Cheers
David

Hi David,

Thanks for the suggestion - I've just spoken with the lead Dev. and he and I both agree that this would be incredibly complex and impractical to implement. There are so many variables and uncertain features of a pop-up: e.g. no fixed position on the page, so where would the flattened pop-up box go? What to do if there is other content beneath the default position? The next question, after that, would be "how can I change the default positioning?" as users would inevitably run into placement 'errors ' with the flattened pop-up being placed over existing content.

There's also the question of how to handle replies to notes and what to do if there is enough information in the pop-up that it requires a scroll bar, or must span multiple pages.

It really goes very far beyond the intended scope of a sticky note/annotation pop-up and the sheer complexity of the implementation mean that we'll have to decline the request.

I know that's not what you wanted to hear, but hopefully that makes sense.

Cheers,

Thank you Will,

I see what you mean. However, I am seeing this feature definitely only for single comments where you manually place and size the bubble exactly where and how you want it -- and then fix it there by flattening.

No need for automatic positioning or handling of scrollbars, let alone replies and all.

This really is for simply freezing a single comment bubble at a time. I would use this all the time for complex/critical documents where I need to absolutely make sure a comment exactly stays in place, or is printed, exactly the way I need it the recipient to see. This especially goes with not-PDF-savvy recipients who do not know that you can point the mouse to comments and things, and read comment text that is hidden therein. Not to mention all those "print-then-delete-a-mail" people (and offices) where never anything is read on the screen anyway, by principle.

And this "freezing" of a single comment bubble should be very easy to implement!

Thank you therefore for considering this concretization further,

Cheers
David

Hi David,

I don't see this as likely to be implemented, as while you only need it for a specific case - there will be other people that will come and ask for it to be a fully functional tool in all aspects - and this gets more complex and uncertain than could be justified.

As a workaround may I suggest that you do "print" the PDF file back to PDF - with the Notes and Pop-ups checkbox in the print preview window. This should "fix them in place" just as you want them. The caveat is that embedded fonts will be converted to curves, but if the target is the kind of users you mention - then they should be fine with that.

An alternative workaround, that will obviously be quite slower, but won't convert text to curves, would be to copy the text from the sticky note's pop-up, and paste it in a text box annotation, position the text box where you want it and then delete the sticky note. (You can even try the call-out box - so that there is an arrow to the original position where the comment bubble was.)

Regards,
Stefan

Hi Stefan,

thank you for your reply.

I think that it is clear that this feature can never be 'fully functional' (like: automatic) in the sense of it automatically finding enough space on every page where the comment text bubbles can be placed and then flattened.

Therefore I can not see that a given feature for the manual flattening of single comment text bubbles would lead to people asking for an extended/automatic version of this feature (which is not possible anyway, see above).

With respect to the printing of PDF-to-PDF: while this is possible as a workaround, it unfortunately does not print the tail of the comment bubble, which can make the bubble considerably less meaningful. Also, bubbles are printed as bitmaps. However, if these two issues could be resolved, the PDF-to-PDF printing indeed would be a good workaround.

The other workaround, i.e. using text boxes and callouts -- this is of course what I already do a lot. But it is rather clumsy to re-create something that is basically already there (the comment bubble including its text).

Therefore, maybe this request can be left open. As always, if nobody else supports it, it would be low-priority.

Cheers
David

Thanks for the input David.

Lets see what kind of support this request has from other users etc.

That's fine with me, Paul.
Thanks @all for the feedback.
Cheers
David

Thank you for the work-arounds. I agree that being able to flatten text would really be a nice feature. I guess the copy and paste works for now.