In the previous issue of DesignGeek, I wrote a story about using the Text Box comment tool to add formatted text to any PDF right in Acrobat. I love this tip and use it all the time myself:

Add Formatted Text to PDFs on the Fly
http://senecadesign.com/designgeek/dgarchives/designgeek68.php
http://www.designgeek.com/add-formatted-text-pdfs-fly

A few days ago I was adding some language to a contract a vendor had sent me as a PDF. The Text Box tool worked wonderfully to add exactly what I wanted to include, in the right place and in the right font. I saved my changes, but before I closed the file and e-mailed the revised contract back to them, I printed out a copy for my records.

I grabbed the pages from the laser printer and took a look. Ack! Where did my edits go? The printout didn't include them. It was the original contract they had sent me.

I checked my settings in Acrobat 8's Print dialog box, and found the problem. I had set it to print "Document Only" from the dropdown menu. Acrobat didn't print the additional text I entered with the Text Box tool because it considered those to be comments. To get the printout I wanted, I needed to choose "Document and Markup" from the menu instead. I did so, and when I made a new printout, my Text Box additions were there.

Okay, so now *I* knew how to make sure my new contract language appeared in the printout, but how could I make sure my vendor knew? It's not something you can set and save in Acrobat, like you can with a PDF's initial view scale.

I was planning on returning it to them as a PDF attachment. (Yes, I could always put my good printout in an envelope and mail it to them, but — puh-leeze!) When my vendor's admin opened the attachment in Reader or Acrobat to print it, would they always remember my accompanying instructions to specify Document and Markup in Acro's or Reader's Print dialog box?

I think not. And this was a contract … it was vital my edits always appear.

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Solution: Burn Them In
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Here's what I discovered. To convert Text Box comments into actual type embedded in the PDF, print the PDF from within Acrobat to the virtual Adobe PDF printer (aka "refrying" a PDF). The virtual printer gets installed automatically when you install any recent version of Adobe Acrobat.

If you've never printed to it, it's easy. Open the File > Print dialog box and choose Adobe PDF 8.0 (or whatever version you have installed) from the Printer dropdown list. When you click OK, you'll get an Open/Save dialog box where you can name the PDF and choose where to save it. It should open automatically in Acrobat when it's done.

To test that your Text Box text has been "burned into" the new PDF, press Command-Shift-8 (Ctrl-Shift-8 on Windows), the shortcut for Hide Comments. Your text should remain visible, nothing should change. To show comments again, press Command/Ctrl-8.

Nothing else I tried worked, by the way — OS X's Save as PDF, PDF Optimizer, exporting to PDF/X-1a, and so on. Either they weren't able to generate a PDF at all, or the comments remained as comments. It's likely that exporting to PostScript and then distilling would work (I think), but once I found that printing to PDF did the trick, I was happy.

BTW I would not recommend refrying press-ready PDFs you're going to send to a commercial printer. It's fine for "regular" PDFs, though, that you're using as final documents.

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