Flattening all Content in a PDF

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
May 7, 2019
1 reply
2634 views

I am trying to make a permanent, un-removable watermark. I've got some custom javascript that puts a vector watermark on the pdf.

Just for good measure I use the flatten image option in both action wizard and preflight (I am using Acrobat X). However if I go to "navigation pane -> content" I can still see the individual watermark and delete it.

What am I missing in order to flatten all containers together? (i.e. essentially save the files as jpegs and then combine them again).

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try67

Community Expert

You can export the file to an image format and then re-create it. That would achieve this goal. It will also remove all the "real" text from it, as well as a bunch of other things (comments, fields, links, metadata, etc.).

tyfiAuthor

Participant

Thanks for the input @try67 I'm looking for something a little more automated (I'll be doing this to hundreds of pdf's). Also I worry that converting them to images and back again would degrade the image quality.

try67

Community Expert

It might, yes, but that is the only way of doing it that I'm aware of.

It might be possible to automate it, but I'm not sure that you'd want to do that within Acrobat. A standalone application might be a more suitable tool for this task.

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