Prevent Touchup in stamps

Hi Jeffery,

That's interesting- is it possible for you to share the file that exhibits this behavior? How are you flattening the file?

Hope this helps,

Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
[url=http://www.windjack.com]www.windjack.com[/url]

Hi again Jeffery,

After a little investigation I found out that yes, it is possible to use the TouchUp tool to modify the flattened stamp. This is because when you flatten the PDF you make everything in the PDF part of the "content" and the TouchUp tool is used to modify "content" in a PDF. Of course, you must have Acrobat Pro to use that tool. I think the reason that some of your stamps are not available to the TouchUp tool is because of the PDF structure- in some cases content can be sort of buried in the structure so that the TouchUp tool cannot find that content or access it easily.

To prevent all uses of the TouchUp tool from modifying any content, you would need to add security to the PDF. It seems a bit at odds with the whole idea of flattening, but it appears to be the case here.

Hope that helps,

Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
[url=http://www.windjack.com]www.windjack.com[/url]

I'll chime in here, because this is a common misconception (or at least similar to one). Flattening has nothing to do with the ability to edit contents in a PDF file. Many people think that a PDF by its very nature is not a file one can edit, and this is not the case. The touch-up tools in Acrobat are designed to allow editing for late-stage touch-ups. Dimitri is absolutely correct in that adding security is what you want to do if you want to completely prevent editing. Use a permissions password and disallow changes to the document.

Flattening is either a process to move contents from the Annotations layer (includes things like Form elements and Comments) in a PDF file to the content layer, or it's the process of removing transparent elements from the document and replacing them with non-tranparent objects that look like the transparent objects. The results in either case are at least somewhat editable.

The reason you could edit some stamps and not others is related to the way you created the stamp. Stamps from Word content probably became pixel-based objects, so the Touch Up Object tool would not affect them. The Touch Up Image tool probably would.