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Printing Sticky Notes on a PDF

By Rick Borstein

Sticky Notes are probably the most common method used to add notes and comments to PDF documents.

To add a Sticky Note, simply right-click anywhere on the page and choose Add Sticky Note. A sticky note will appear and you can add text to it easily.

Sticky notes can be minimized so that they don’t cover up your document, or left open so you can see the text inside:

One frequent question I get is how to print pages with the contents of the sticky note showing.

In this article, you’ll discover how to print a document with the sticky notes showing in Acrobat.

Set a Preference to Print Sticky Notes

Acrobat does not normally print sticky notes. You’ll need to change a preference to enable printing of notes.

Choose Edit> Preferences and click on the Commenting category.

A) Choose the Segoe UI font matches print output better
B) Optional: Set Pop-up Opacity to 100%
C) Enable Print Notes and Comments
D) Disable pop-up scrolling (Makes it easier to position notes)

What is Pop-up Opacity? By default, Sticky Notes have a transparency of 85%. Viewed on screen or in print, the page beneath the sticky note will be visible. If you prefer on-screen and printed notes to have a solid white background, you can change it to 100%.

Positioning the Sticky Notes for Print

Acrobat does not provide a 1 to 1 correspondence between the appearance of sticky notes on-screen and your printed output.

I had best results with my document viewed at 75%.

You will need to spend some time positioning the Sticky Notes where you want them to print.

Printing the PDF with the Sticky Notes

To print the document, choose File>Print.

Before clicking the Print button, ensure that you are printing the PDF with the Document and Markups setting:

Acrobat will show you a preview of the page as it will print. Sometimes, the printed view of the note might not show all of the text in the note. If that is the case, you will see a small black symbol on the corner of the note in the preview window.

What does it look like when printed?

Here’s an example below:

What about Adobe Reader? Adobe Reader does not provide a way to print the contents of sticky notes. Sorry, you will need at least Acrobat Standard.

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Full post as published by Acrobat for Legal Professionals on June 22, 2010 (boomark / email).