How Does Flattening a document Work?

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
April 7, 2020
1 reply
1163 views

I would like to ask a few technical questions for a blog post. Could you direct me to someone? Some of the questions would include: How does flattening a document work in Adobe? How does using Adobe software compare to saving a document page as a JPEG and reinserting it? What is the difference in flattening versus securing? Thanks for your time.

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T

Test Screen Name

Legend

Some questions for you.

1. What is "Adobe" to you? To us it's the name of the company. What product do you mean?

2. What do you mean by "flattening" exactly? Adobe software and customers use the word to mean at least four entirely different, and in some ways contradictory, things.

3. What do you mean by "securing"?

4. What is your focus or aim in talking about flattening/securing? There are many scenarios of imaginary security which are best understood as useless, rather than repeated.

C

coscinecreativeAuthor

Participant

Thanks!

1) Adobe Acrobat Pro or Indesign

2) By flattening, I mean taking a PowerPoint or Word document with text and images and creating one layer. Right?

3) I thought securing is more like password protection so unintended audiences can't access it.

4) I'm doing research for a blog post for a group of authors who create documents using copyrighted text and or images and don't want others stealing those works. For example, some of the clip art is sold in $15 increments. But, once purchased, sometimes that clip art is used in a document that is only $1. So, for the dishonest person, it is easier to purchase the $1 document. Which, I really don't care about except some of these clip artist are asking authors to "flatten" documents through specific procedures that I've proved to be ineffective at least with Adobe InDesign and Acrobat Pro. So, I'm trying to figure out the best procedure and then present the options. I know that is a lot of information, but its a huge pain point among some authors.

Bernd Alheit

Community Expert

I see your point. But, I need a deeper understanding of why so that I can convince the clip artists to remove their "you must flatten" restrictions. I'm definitely not trying to foolproof our work, just make it more difficult to steal.

So far like the poster said above rasterizing has been the best deterrent. It takes me about 20 seconds to steal clip art when something has been "flattened". However, with rasterizing, I can't. But there is the issue of needing live hyperlinks. So, I need to understand more, so that I can come up with a solution to present to the clip artists who we purchase illustrations for our work from.

Does that make sense? I know flattening isn't the answer. I just need detailed information that I can further simplify for the masses.

When you convert the PDF file into images you will lost hyperlinks, bookmarks, and other features.

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