Locking text boxes within a pdf

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
March 8, 2021
2 replies
6692 views

Hi there. I need to lock multiple text boxes within a pdf document. The document has over 600 pages and there are 4405 text boxes. I know that in theory I can lock all by going to Tools/Comments/Open then selecting all the comments, right click and tick Locked but the document is so big that it crashes when I try to do this. Even scrolling down the list of comments to highlight prior to right clicking them all takes ages and then results in a Not Responding message. Any tips for a pain-free way to do this, please?

Edit and convert PDFs

Correct answer try67

Assuming you mean Text Box comments you can do it using this script:

this.syncAnnotScan();
var annots = this.getAnnots();
if (annots!=null) {
	for (var i in annots) {
		var annot = annots[i];
		if (annot.type=="FreeText") annot.setProps({lock: true, readOnly: true});
	}
}

try67

Correct answer

Community Expert

Assuming you mean Text Box comments you can do it using this script:

this.syncAnnotScan();
var annots = this.getAnnots();
if (annots!=null) {
	for (var i in annots) {
		var annot = annots[i];
		if (annot.type=="FreeText") annot.setProps({lock: true, readOnly: true});
	}
}

Eric Dumas

Community Expert

Hi,

Can you include a screenshot and a description of what you would like to achieve at the end.

Are you trying to manage comments, text fields of a form,...?

L

Lynne AAuthor

Participant

Hi there. I haven't been able to share a screenshot, sorry. I'm basically trying to lock all the annotations that have been added to a pdf document so they can't be moved around the page. The issue I'm having is that when I try to select all the text box comments the document starts to crash every time as it's so big. I don't have javascript editor so can't use the scripts offered as solutions. Most of the text boxes are already locked so I basically need an esay way to select only those that are unlocked so I can then lock them en masse but I can't figure out how to do this. If I filter by author/reviewer etc. it's still too big and keeps crashing.

Thanks

try67

Community Expert

If you have Acrobat then you have a JavaScript editor. Press Ctrl+J to display it.

Then paste the code into it, select it all and press Ctrl+Enter to run it.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded