Commented PDF files

[Claudio.Nasso]

Good morning to everybody at Adobe,

Could you confirm that also the new ID 2020 (15.0) "PDF Comments" works only when exporting (CTRL+E) and reimporting a PDF file generated by InDesign.15.0, as happened in InDesign 14.0?

I mean, when I try to import a commented PDF file generated by other applications (say, MS Word, or PDFs created with the printer driver "Adobe PDF") I get the error "PDF is not created from InDesign. Select another PDF to continue".

Is there any "project/expectation" to let us import also commented PDFs non directly generated by Adobe InDesign?

Thank you.

All the best.

Claudio

[Test Screen Name]

That is to miss the point of the feature, I think. When you make a PDF from InDesign and then  bring it back with the comments, it doesn't place the PDF. Rather, it looks at the comments and identifies exactly where in each InDesign text block the comment belongs, to give you the option to review and optionally apply the edit to your InDesign text. To work it must be the same InDesign file, NOT EDITED AT ALL.  This is a fabulous feature for speeding up the review of InDesign documents. It's hard to imagine what could happen if it imported commented PDFs from other apps, nothing would line up with the InDesign elements. 

Let's turn it around. What would you WANT to happen if you imported comments from, say, a PDF made in Word? Maybe there is another way to get the results you want...

[Laubender]

Hi Claudio,

exactly. You need a PDF exported from InDesign version 14 or InDesign version 15.

Why? Because InDesign is writing a special comment, so called PieceInfo, to every PDF that will be retrieved by PDF Comments.

Without that comment the PDF Comments panel cannot load the PDF.

To detect what's in a particular /PieceInfo field of an exported PDF browse the internal PDF structure using Acrobat Pro DC:

Print Production > Preflight > Options > Browse Internal PDF Structure…

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[Claudio.Nasso]

Thank you Uwe for your reply.

I perfectly understand what you are saying.

And thanks to Test_Screen_Name too, even if in the past I have faced this same problem when creating a PDF file printing (CTRL+P) an INDD document using the printer driver "Adobe PDF" instead of directly exporting (CTRL+E) the same document to a PDF.

Regards,

Claudio

[Laubender]

Hi Claudio,

it seems there is one alternative to PDF Comments:

http://www.dtptools.com/product.asp?id=anid

Personally I have no experience with Annotations form dtptools, but it may do what you want: Working with PDFs that contain annotations where the PDF was never exported from any version of InDesign.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[matthewh21209257]

I had good luck with the DTP Tools Annotation tool.I had encountered a problem because I had used another software package (pdftk) to remove some pages from the PDFs created by InDesign. When I tried to import comments, I got the error message, "PDF is not created from InDesign. Select another PDF to continue." The Annotation tool was able to correctly import all of the comments and edits from a marked up PDF.

It cost me $12.90 for a one-month subscription, but it ended up saving me a lot of time.

Next time I will just create the PDFs for reviewers with InDesign and not manipulate them with any other software.

[JonathanArias]

you can take the comments from a .pdf made from an older version of indesign and export them. 

next, import the comments on to your newer .pdf.

this is how you can bring commnents to a .pdf in so you can now load them into indesign.