How are commenting, PDF/A, and accessibility and reflow related?

If you do not want to create PDF/A compliant files from Word you can change this setting. In Word select Adobe PDF > Change Conversion Settings > Settings tab uncheck Create PDF/A-1a compliant file.PDF/A files are designed for archiving, which is why you cannot comment on this when viewing in this mode.

Hi Lori,

Plausible indeed, and just to make sure we've gone back to check, but the option to generate PDF/A compliant files is *not* checked.

So far all of our tests consistently seem to indicate that if accessibility and reflow is checked, the file cannot be commented. Reader can tell that it is reader-enabled for commenting (it shows the "Welcome back to shared review" on opening the file, and the button is there to check for new comments), but the comment and markup toolbar will not appear whatever we try.

However if we regenerate the PDF without accessibility and reflow, it works without any problem.

Now confirmed with both Reader 9.0.0 and 9.1.0.

Raf

Well, we’ve spent a bit more time investigating this offline, but for the benefit of the forum I thought I should report back with an update.

For the sake of completeness, this is happening on Windows Xp SP3, with Office 2007 SP1, Acrobat Professional 8.1.2, and Reader 9.0.0 and 9.1.0.

When we had established that the problem did not occur with all documents, Lori suggested to have a closer look at the document content itself, which has now lead us to the point where we seem to have identified a cause (without suggesting that it is a good and valid reason for it not to work, but at least it looks like we have a better idea of what the trigger is):

- Round-trip via RTF (as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918429): no impact, problem still exists.
- Chop the document up: no impact, both halves of the document have the problem!
- Switch review between balloons and inline: no impact, problem still exists.
- Turn change tracking off: no impact, problem still exists. But can you see where this is going?
- [b]Accept all changes[/b]: problem goes away! Whether change-tracking is on or off when generating the PDF seems not to make a difference.

Seeing as the point is to present reviewers with the changes that have been made and to invite their further comments, publishing with changes shown is an essential requirement. Accepting all changes does look like it removes the issue, but it also removes most of the information that the reviewers are interested in … so we’re back to turning Accessibility and Reflow off.

Apparently there was an issue in PDFMaker 8.1.2 when using Track Changes in Word that could cause similar issues to what you were experiencing. This problem was corrected in Acrobat 9, so if you use PDFMaker version 9, you should be able to turn Accessibility and Reflow back on while still using Track Changes in Word.