Issue: PDF Comments (FreeText) Not Appearing in Illustrator

[ABOADAM]

Hi Adobe Team and Community,

I'm running into a persistent issue when working between Adobe Acrobat Pro and Illustrator.

When I add a FreeText comment (annotation) in Acrobat Pro (for example: a label like "X2X5" placed near a barcode), the comment is clearly visible inside Acrobat — but completely disappears when I open the same PDF in Adobe Illustrator.

I understand that Illustrator reads only the page content and not the annotations layer, but in many real-world workflows — especially for designers working with marked-up PDFs — it's crucial to have those comments embedded as part of the visible content so they appear in Illustrator for editing, outline conversion, or print.

Suggested Solution / Feature Request:
Please consider adding a native feature in Acrobat that allows users to:

Convert selected comments (FreeText annotations) into actual text objects on the page.

Flatten annotations into the page content in a way compatible with Illustrator.

Or offer a "Print with Comments as Content" export option for clean handoff between Acrobat and Illustrator.

This would greatly help designers, prepress professionals, and teams that rely on PDF markup for packaging, branding, and print workflows.

Thanks in advance — I hope this can be addressed in a future update or shared with the Illustrator/Acrobat product teams.
Best regards,

Ahmad

[Abhishek Rao]

Hi @ABOADAM,

Thank you so much for clearly outlining the issue and also suggesting possible solutions. You're absolutely right that Illustrator doesn't currently read PDF annotations, including FreeText comments, since it only interprets the main page content.

At the moment, a possible workaround would be to flatten the comments into the PDF content using Acrobat before opening it in Illustrator. You can do this by printing the PDF to a new PDF using the 'Adobe PDF' printer and choosing to include comments as part of the print content. 

I understand that this functionality is important to you, and I apologize for its unavailability at this time. Would you mind creating a UserVoice for this feature request (https://adobe.ly/44OTtyy) and adding your comments there? Doing this will help us prioritize this request, and you'll also get notified of any updates.

Looking forward to hearing how it goes!

Abhishek 

[ABOADAM · Accepted solution]

Thank you so much,
@Abhishek Rao  for your kind and thoughtful reply.

You're absolutely right Illustrator's current behavior makes sense technically, but in real-world design workflows (especially packaging, branding, or prepress), it's quite common to receive marked-up PDFs with FreeText annotations that we need to preserve as visible elements.

I really appreciate the workaround you suggested using the "Adobe PDF" printer to flatten the comments. I'll definitely try it, though a native and editable solution would be far more practical.

I've just submitted the feature request to UserVoice as you recommended. Here's the link for reference:

[link for post. click here]

Thanks again, and I hope this feature will be considered seriously in future updates. It would make a big difference to many creatives and print professionals.

Best regards,

Ahmad