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.

Thom Parker

Community Expert

Within the context of PDF fields, the term "flattening" is used in two different contexts, 1) for Form fields and Annotations, and 2) for OCG layers. In both cases it means merging content from multiple objects into the main PDF page content. This is not related to files converted into PDF, but I could be missing a usage context. But in general flattening means merging content into the PDF page content.

This does not secure the content. Anyone with sufficient expertise who can view the PDF can extract and or manipulate content in a PDF. That is not to say that you cannot create different levels of difficulty in being able to do this. For example, converting a PDF page to a raster image format makes it more difficult to cleanly extract graphics. But nothing is every completely safe.

Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often

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