Microsoft Word change tracking appears in PDFs

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
July 10, 2019
2 replies
3276 views

I frequently use PDFMaker to create PDFs from Microsoft Word documents that have changing tracking marks and marginal comments. I know that to avoid having the changing tracking and comments appear in the output, I must set Word's "markup" dropdown to "No Markup." And every time I make another PDF, I have to set it to "No Markup" again.

My problem is that with some document files, PDFMaker includes change tracking and comments in output even when I do set "No Markup." I've also tried disabling all of the individual types of marks that Word can display; that makes no difference.

To get a clean PDF I have to make a copy of my document, accept all change tracking, and delete all comments. Then, if I edit the file and want another PDF, I have to do it again.

What can I do to make PDFMaker print a clean copy of a Word document without going through those contortions?

The OS is Windows 7. Word is from Office 365. PDFMaker is from Acrobat XI Pro.

Dov Isaacs

Legend

What happens if you use Microsoft's otherwise buggy Save as PDF for the same document. Does it also exhibit this issue? Please advise so that we can better determine what is going on. Note that if Microsoft's Save as PDF has the same symptoms, the problem is “upstream” from Acrobat's PDFMaker, i.e., the content coming to PDFMaker from Office already has this material in it.

- Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)

O

OrthoducksAuthor

Inspiring

I responded to this about a week ago but the server seems to have lost the response, so I'll try again.

Save to PDF is the interface to PDFMaker. If there's another, I don't know about it. So the answer to "what happens when I use Save to PDF?" is: I explained that when I first came here.

While this is a mixed vendor situation, I posted here first because there's much more Adobe code that Microsoft code involved in the problem; thus Adobe code is much more like to be causing the problem. When you suggested that the problem might be in Word I posted my query in Microsft's forum, and I got a response suggesting that I try one of the third party PDF making tools.

Right now I can't do that because I can't make it fail. Evidently something other than the particular document file determines whether there's a problem, something I didn't know before. The next time the problem presents, I'll try CutePDF and see if it works when PDFMaker doesn't.

That won't solve the problem because PDFMaker is the only tool I know of that creates PDFs with some of the properties we need, but it will help me determine where the problem lies.

Dov Isaacs

Legend

Actually, with Office 365 and Acrobat, there are four different ways of producing PDF from within Word.

The first is printing to the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance. This kills transparency, color management, links, and almost anything else useful simply because Word is produced GDI which the driver converts to PostScript and the driver plugins funnel to the Acrobat Distiller which creates PDF from the PostScript. The only time where this method is really necessary is if you have EPS graphics in your Word document, something this is exceptionally unlikely these days.

Under Windows 10 (yes, I know you don't have that), there is an ability to print to Microsoft Print to PDF in which case Word produces GDI which is converted into XPS by a filter which sends the XPS to the driver which converts the XPS to PDF. This is even worse that printing to Adobe PDF.

In Word, you can invoke File=>Save as and within the file dialog, instead of Word Document, select PDF. This is not Adobe's PDF, but rather Microsoft's direct save to PDF. It has some commonalities with Acrobat's PDFMaker functionality in that it works off of EMF data passed by Word to the PDF creation plug-in. However, Microsoft's PDF has “issues” with any OpenType CFF fonts, color management, and various image formats.

What remains, assuming you have a recent enough version of Acrobat installed is Acrobat PDFMaker. You can invoke PDFMaker in one of two ways, either using Create PDF entry on the Acrobat tab of the Word ribbon or the File=>Save as Adobe PDF function. Both provide the exact same results.

What is true is that formatting of the PDF output in terms of the content on the page (i.e. line breaks, whether or not you see markup, etc. is governed by Word and not by any Adobe code. The same anomaly you are currently seeing (i.e., markups, etc.) would appear in Microsoft's Save as PDF as well as in Save as Adobe PDF.

What is especially interesting is that you now “cannot make it fail.” Perhaps Office 365 (which updates itself silently in the background when it in active use) had a bug that Microsoft fixed in one of these stealth updates. If that is the case and you can't reproduce the problem at all anymore, mazel tov, we have nothing more to worry about. If you can reproduce the problem again and you can provide us with the file for which the problems occurs, we can look at it here at Adobe under Acrobat DC and see whether (1) we can reproduce it and (2) where the issue lies.

- Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)