Highlighting and Drawing Auto Duplicates Across Random Pages of PDF in Acrobat DC Pro

[tensun.studio]

Hello, 

I am on a Mac on Mojave and my Acrobat DC Pro is giving me this issue:

When I attempt to highlight text content, it creates duplicate highlight instances across every third or fourth page. The pagination of the duplication is varied. The same thing happens with shapes, text, drawings — it creates duplicate instances across every third or fourth page. 

I tried optimizing the pdf and the problem persists. I am able to replicate the problem on my ipad 11 Pro, Acrobat App.

I hope to find a solution to be able to create unique highlighting and text on each page. I do not want to Duplicate any highlights, text, or drawings across pages. Please point me in the right direction! Thanks in advance.  

Kristen

[Bernd Alheit]

Does this happens with all PDF files?

[arvindy]

Hi tensun_studio,

Could you please send a sample pdf and screen recording of the issue to understand the problem?

You can upload these on any cloud storage and share the link here.

Regards,

Arvind

[tensun.studio]

Hello! 

Thanks for the quick replies.  It does not appear to be happening on all pdfs.  I would love to eliminate this bug for this pdf though! 

Here is a screen recording of the issue: 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/b8tv5nrlxxnvz6i/duplicating-comments-on-pdf.mov?dl=0

It seems to be happening on every other page, it just takes a moment to populate. And it also seems contained within chapters... maybe.  

This is the pdf— received from an Instructor for a class. This is the marked up version I generated for the screen recording. 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lkj4dj8j4h6wsa9/Audio%20Recording%20Textbook.pdf?dl=0

I found another instance of the same pdf online— if you want to see a fresh download. It has the same exact issue.  

https://www.pdfdrive.com/modern-recording-techniques-seventh-edition-book-e185154642.html

No other pdfs are exhibiting this bug. What can I do to purge the bug from the file? 

Thanks in advance. 

Kristen

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

The only way I found to remove this behavior (which is clearly a bug, but we don't know if it's in Acrobat or in the document - or a combination) is to split the document into individual pages, and then combine these pages again into a new PDF document. You can search for "split" in the tool search function in Acrobat, just make sure that you split into chunks of one page, then select File>Create>Combine Files into one PDF. 

This unfortunately will remove the bookmark structure from the document. That's a side effect we cannot fix. In theory, you can replace the pages in the original document with the ones that you split out and combined again, but when you do that, the problem is back. 

[tensun.studio]

Thanks for your reply. I might try the split workaround. 

Really appreciate all the speedy replies here! 

Best!

K

[tdc_1587]

I have seen all of the comments that are from 2020.  It is now near the end of 2024, why has this issue not yet been resolved?  It is happening to me frequently at this time.

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

We have not heard from anybody working for Adobe since the samples were posted, so your guess is as good as mine. There was a recent hew version of Acrobat. Have you updated yet? Just in case this bug got fixed.