Design Center article
Enabling commenting in Reader
By default, PDF documents cannot be modified in any way with the free Adobe® Acrobat® Reader. Unfortunately, this ban includes attaching comments to a file. If you want people to be able to review your document in Adobe Reader, you must explicitly turn on that ability for the document.
Once your PDF document has been enabled for commenting in Reader, you’re restricted in what you can do to that document. Even in Acrobat Standard or Pro, you can no longer shuffle pages, edit page contents, add form fields or links, or otherwise modify the document. This will be true until you disable the ability to annotate the document in Reader.
Requirements
To complete this article, you will need the following software:
Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional
Enabling commenting in Reader
To enable a document for commenting in Adobe Reader:
- Select Document > Enable for Commenting and Analysis in Adobe Reader (Figure 1).
Figure 1: You must explicitly enable the use of Adobe Reader to comment on a document.
Acrobat will present you with a dialog box warning you that file editing will be restricted (Figure 2). Then a Save dialog box opens, because Acrobat insists that you re-save the Reader-enabled file.
Figure 2: Acrobat warns you that once a document is enabled for commenting in Adobe Reader, it’s no longer editable even in Acrobat Pro.
- Save the Reader-enabled file with a new name and new location on your disk. If you later attempt to edit the PDF file in Acrobat Pro or Standard, an alert opens, giving you an opportunity to save a copy of the document without Adobe Reader commenting permission (Figure 3); the newly saved file is once again editable in Acrobat Pro.
Figure 3: If you try to edit a Reader-enabled document in Acrobat Pro, you’re prompted to save an editable copy of that document.
Where to go from here
For more information about commenting in Acrobat 8, check out these other great tutorials:
- Exporting comments to a Word document (Windows) from Acrobat 8, by Donna Baker
- Working with the Comments List in Acrobat 8, by Donna Baker
- Organizing comments in Acrobat 8, by Donna Baker
About the authors
John Deubert is a longtime consultant and instructor in Acrobat and PDF, having worked with both since the mid-nineties. He has extensive experience in PostScript and JavaScript and is the author of "Creating Adobe Acrobat Forms" and "Extending Acrobat Forms with JavaScript", both from Adobe Press. John's experience with JavaScript dates back to shortly after the language was first introduced in 1996; he has worked with JavaScript in Acrobat since 1999, when Acrobat 4 introduced useful support for the language. John has taught classes on PostScript and Acrobat throughout the world since 1985.
Excerpted from "Adobe Acrobat 8 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide" by John Deubert. Copyright © 2007 John Deubert. Used with the permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and Peachpit. All rights reserved. For more information about this book, please visit peachpit.com.
