"draft" (and other watermark) in Acrobat

[FieryPantone]

Prepare book in Framemaker, save as .pdf – looks fine, which is what you'd hope for! Add "draft" watermark at 50% transparency, and Acrobat helpfully adds a dark grey veil to every page to make sure it's a highly confidential draft that can't be read – not fine, not fine at all. I'll ask the question here because I'm sure there will be people who use a similar workflow. fwiw, any attempt at generating a list of comments once I've used Acrobat to send a document out for review also generates a "black book".  Thanks in advance for any hints and tips.  [FM 9.0p255, Acrobat 9 Pro Extended 9.3.2]

[Michael_Müller-Hillebrand]

Niels,

Regarding the FrameMaker POV, I have seen (and am working with) templates that feature a slanted text frame in the background of each master page, filled with a single paragraph (large bold font, yellow color) that contains a variable "draft". So you can easily set the variable in one document of the book and then import the variable definitions into all other documents. You can also assign different status names to different files, if necessary.

As I have seen that implemented this way only I cannot comment on the Acrobat feature.

Nice Sunday,

- Michael

[Be.eM]

Michael Müller-Hillebrand wrote:

Regarding the FrameMaker POV, I have seen (and am working with) templates that feature a slanted text frame in the background of each master page, filled with a single paragraph (large bold font, yellow color) that contains a variable "draft".

Michael,

just on a side note, this method has one big disadvantage:

If the watermark "draft" (or else) is real text, it's written as such into the PDF. And since especially "draft" PDFs are often used for review purposes, where the reviewer wants to highlight or cross out text in the PDF, he/she will encounter difficulties to do so, at least in overlapping regions. In many (if not all) cases the Acrobat text cursor will discover the big "draft" text box, and will not allow to select the smaller text entities in the foreground.

That's why I'm using an EPS image of outline text in the background for creating a "draft" watermark. Also no "real" text in the EPS, which would cause the same problems.

Bernd

[Art_Campbell1]

My perpetual question: Do you get the same behaviour when you Print to the (default) Acrobat printer?

And are both Frame and Acrobat fully patched?

And because you didn't provide full system info --  if you're running on XP, did you apply the Microsoft Hotfix for PostScript printers?

Art

[Arnis Gubins]

Hi Niels,

I apply watermarks in Acrobat quite often and have never seen the behaviour (dark grey veil)  that you describe nor have I seen the "black book " effect from comment lists. I notice that your Acrobat version isn't patched to the latest (9.4.1).

Does this happen to all PDFs or just PDFs generated from FrameMaker or to only some PDFs from FrameMaker?

[FieryPantone]

Thanks to everyone for input, and a Happy New year en passant ... as you'll see, I've been busy elsewhere for a while. I'll start by patching my Acrobat (and not lose too much time wondering why Adobe updater ahs never tipped me the wink on that on)  More later!

[FieryPantone]

Upgraded to 9.4.1 – thanks to Arnis for the tip – and I'm seeing exactly the same problem with extracted comments. Black veil overlaying not just the extracted comments but also the commented pages; except in the thumbnails, which have mysteriously been spared.

[GTEdgeBlue]

Seeing same problem on Acrobat 9 and X