Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Law Technology Blogs -> Acrobat for Legal Professionals

Law Technology

: Acrobat for Legal Professionals

Ensuring the PDF Comments Get Printed

By Rick Borstein

Attorneys and other legal professionals use Acrobat comments and annotations to stamp their signature on documents, add highlights, circle important passages, etc.

I recently received this email message from an attorney:

I use the Stamp tool to affix a graphic of my signature to pleadings before e-filing them or sharing them with other counsel.  But recipients who fail to choose to print with "Document and Markups" produce a doc that lacks my signature.  So, I've taken to flattening them by printing to my PDF driver, but that produces a doc of embarassingly poor quality.

Some Background

Acrobat offers the ability to print documents with or without comments. If you choose File—>Print, you will see the following option:

If you had a heavily commented document with lots of highlights, you may wish to print a clean copy by choosing the "Document" option.

Once you select an option here, the setting is sticky for the next time you print from Acrobat.

Unfortunately, signature stamps are also a type of annotation. If your client or colleague has recently chosen the "Document" option, the important agreement you worked on won't have your signature.

Fortunately, there are some good workarounds:

1. Flatten the document so that Stamps and Annotations become part of the document layer
2. Embed your signature as an image, rather than a stamp
3. Add a special "Print with Comments" button to your document.

In this article, I'll discuss these three workarounds. Read on to learn about them.

Acrobat Comments,PDF Comments,Printing Acrobat Comments,Flattening PDF,Flattening Comments

Full post as published by Acrobat for Legal Professionals on January 31, 2008 (boomark / email).