How to Extract Text From Locked Comments within an Acrobat Shared Review

Each quarter, I do a newsletter that has two versions: English and Spanish. After the English layout is done, I send the PDF to my client, who then translates the document into Spanish. I don't speak Spanish, so I needed a way to get the Spanish content into the right place without inadvertently copying and pasting back into the wrong spot in my InDesign document. With Acrobat commenting, I can copy and paste right from the Comments tab into the corresponding text of the InDesign document. We've used PDF commenting with great success, in order to avoid emailing large files back and forth. I recently decided to give Acrobat Shared Reviews a try. It enables us to avoid emailing the proofs, and also allows for multiple people to comment and we can all see their comments.

However, I discovered that using Acrobat shared reviews, I can no longer copy and paste text from the Comments tab in Acrobat. See how one of the comments has a little lock symbol next to it? That comment is from my client, and the text is seemingly inaccessible to me.

After several frustrating experiments with exporting comments and then reimporting them into a non-tracked document (with marginal success), I discovered that I simply open the pop up note, I can copy the text from there. Sweet! Another PDF challenged solved!