Document with unknown Comments with no content

[RobertMcM00]

We have a vendors manual we received that has 396 pages. In the pdf manual there are 6,637 comments dated to 2009. The majority of the 6,637 coments have no content. The attached example is page 24. The comments are spread randomly on the page (some seem to be located off the page). Of the 45 comments on page 24 only one has content which ironically is the statement "This page intentionally left blank."

What could be the origin of the Comments? Could these "ghost" comments be a result of a past OCR event where non word/letter artifacts were picked up by the OCR?  Doesn't seem to make sense that the OCR would then make them "Comments."   I doubt there were 45 comments on a blanck page when the author's team reviewed/edited the manual.

These Comments make Adobe Pro react very slowly when loading the file or searching the file for content.

[JR Boulay]

You can remove or flatten these comments.

[RobertMcM00]

I did that to a copy of the document.

My hope was that I could determine where/how these Comments originated.  We have thousands of documents, many we scan in from images and we create many new ones everyday.  If our process has a glitch in it that is generating pdfs with these "Comments" we need to find a way to avoid them.   

[try67 · Accepted solution]

It's nearly impossible to determine that, but it's most likely related to how the file was created.

You'll notice that the text on that page is actually a comment as well. It could be that whatever process was used to create the file decided to place the text using comments instead of actual static text, for whatever reason. Flattening it will take care of that.

[RobertMcM00]

thanks for reply. If I determine the trigger for this I'll provide closure on this topic