How Remove Date and Time From PDF Comments

This was a forum post on the Acrobat forums. I think it's worthwhile to have this here on my blog as well.

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Hi!

I don't want others to see date or time for my comments in Acrobat. So, how do I (preferably permanently) remove those data?

Cheers from Stockholm

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You can't do it inside Acrobat, but there is a way to do it outside of Acrobat. Export the comments as a data file. I wrote about there here.

Change the extension from FDF to XML and open it up in your text editor of choice. Then delete two bits of code. Look for the two sections that have the dates in them. If your have a bunch of comments, it might be easer to do a Search for the year in order to make sure you find them all.

Save the XML file. Change the extension back to FDF. Delete all your old comments (save a backup copy first!) Then reimport it back into your PDF. The dates should be gone. Here is the original comment with the date at the bottom.

And here is the comment after the code was edited in Text Wrangler. No date! 

Edit: 3-10-17: I recently found a related free script that anonymizes comments. 

A Fix for the Dreaded Quick Apply Crash

In my long document production workflow, I use Quick Apply throughout the day. I use it for paragraph styles, character styles, object styles, and inserting variables, among other things. It saves me hours of time from through style panels with hierarchical style groups. If you're not familiar with Quick Apply, I suggest you take a few moments and learn about how it can speed up your workflow.

But seven years after this bug was first being reported, Adobe finally released a fix! Read the entire article at InDesign Secrets.

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How to Add Rotated Text to a PDF using Acrobat DC

In a previous article, I explained various methods of adding add rotated text to a PDF using Acrobat XI. This short video demonstrates how to add rotated text in Acrobat DC using the Add Text Tool (not to be confused with the Add Text Comment Tool).

Edit: 9-13-918
If you need an easier way to rotate text in your PDFs, check out my article on Bluebeam Revu. It's an amazing program designed specifically to meet the needs of users in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction. Revu has a Properties pane which allows you to rotate any annotation!