Flatten PDF

How to flatten a PDF

Flattening matters most with forms. When you fill one in, the words you type are not on the page - they are in a box floating above it, and every reader is free to draw that box differently, hide it, or let the next person type over what you wrote. Some readers even lose it when the file is emailed on.

1. Drop the PDF here.
2. Read what it found: how many form fields, how many notes.
3. Decide whether notes and highlights should go too.
4. Press Flatten it.

What happens to each thing

Form fields are drawn onto the page exactly where they sit, and then removed. The words stay in the same place, in the same font, and nobody can change them.

Notes, highlights, stamps and links sit above the page in the same way but cannot be painted onto it here, so the choice is to remove them or leave them. Removing them is what makes a document genuinely flat, and leaving them is offered because somebody may want their highlights. Either way you are told which you are getting rather than finding out later.

When you want this

Before sending a filled-in application, a signed agreement or a completed timesheet to somebody who must not be able to alter it. Before printing, when a reader has been ignoring your form fields. Before archiving, when the file has to still make sense in ten years without whatever reader you are using today.

It is not encryption and it is not a signature. Somebody determined can still edit any PDF. What flattening does is stop the accidental version: the field cleared by the wrong reader, the answer overtyped by the next person.