Indesign not outputting marked up PDF's and when I place them into Indesign the changes disappear

[cgiller]

I'm a printer who has customers send me PDF art for production.   The customers are making changes to the PDF with the markup feature in Acrobat.    I don't know this.   They email me the "updated art" and I place it in Indesign for imposition to a printer/platemaker.    When I do this the changes are not showing up because they are markups.   The end result is I print thousands of the wrong art and have to reprint.    

I use Indesign because I setup artwork mulitple up for efficency.    Example:  Rather than print 8.5x11, I print 2 up on 11x17 and cut in half.   

The source of the problem is people are using Acrobat Markup for something it's not intended for.   I cannot control that.    Is there a setting or plug in for Indesign that will "see" the markups?

[Laubender · Accepted solution]

Hm.

You may see PDF Comments, technically also called annotations.

I'm not sure about this.

When in Acrobat Pro:

Switch to the Comments workspace. It should be populated with all kind of stuff. You could remove the comments from a PDF, but of course that would also wipe the "changes".

Best show a screenshot with an open PDF from Acrobat where also the Comments workspace is open.

When in InDesign:

One could load the annotations to the PDF Comments panel of InDesign.

See under Window > Comments > PDF Comments. Use the Load button.

But be aware that if you are using InDesign for imposition the loaded PDF Comments will be on the wrong places and maybe they do not even show up because your imposed document's page range is of course different from the placed multipage PDF. Also the page size.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

[Luke Jennings3]

I know this is an old discussion, but you can turn on the Acrobat & Reader preference to "Show comments pane when a pdf with comments is opened", when you see there are comments, you can use an Acrobat preflight fixup to convert pdf annotations (comments) into regular page content, InDesign will recognize and export them. Tools> Print Production> Preflight> Fixups. This fixup can be added to an Acrobat Action, making it easy to quickly apply to a pdf or folder of pdfs.