How Does Flattening a document Work?

[coscinecreative]

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.

[Test Screen Name]

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.

[coscinecreative]

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]

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. 

[coscinecreative]

Thanks!

1) Is there somewhere I can read further about this topic? A book or blog?

2) What would be the most efficient way to convert pdfs to raster images? Most authors in this group are creating 20 ish pages twice a week and saving them as pdfs. Create, save as pdf, then convert to JPG, etc?

I need to make the process as streamlined as possible.

[coscinecreative]

What if we have active hyperlinks in our documents that need preserving? Then that wouldn't be the best way to protect our work, right?

Any suggestions?

[try67]

Flattening doesn't protect you from anything.

[coscinecreative]

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. 

[Bernd Alheit]

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