Locking vs. flattening markups

Revu allows you to either lock or flatten markups to prevent them from being accidentally moved or edited, but how do you know which one to use, and why?

Your goal determines your answer: Are you trying to turn the markups into a permanent part of the document's content, such that can never be edited? Or, do you want to keep the markups from being unintentionally modified or deleted?

To help you make the decision about which to use and when, let's first go over the differences between the Lock and Flatten functions and their advantages.

Lock

The main benefit of a locked markup is flexibility: individual markups can be toggled between locked and unlocked states at any time. To lock a markup, either right-click the markup and select Lock, or use the Lock column in the Markups List.

While locked, a markup cannot be changed or deleted—though certain functions such as status changes, replies, exporting and copying are still available. You can lock markups individually or in a group.

To learn more about how to lock your markups, refer to Creating and Editing Markups.

Flatten

Whenever you flatten markups, Revu merges them into the content layer of the PDF. After this process, changing or modifying your markups is impossible, and they'll no longer appear in the Markups list.

While you can right-click an individual markup and flatten it, you can't unflatten individual markups. The process of unflattening will affect all markups on a page.

To learn more about flattening and unflattening markups, please refer to Flattening Markups.

Processes that prevent unflattening markups

Although the Allow Markup Recovery option in the Flatten Markups dialog allows you to unflatten markups, the functions listed below will alter the content and prevent flattened markups from being recovered:

• Edit Text
• Search and Replace
• Erase Content
• Cut Content
• Reduce File Size
• Apply Redactions
• Color Processing
  This feature is only available with a Core, Complete, or Max plan.
• Repair PDF

If you intend to use any of the above processes with your document, it's recommended that you unflatten your markups before doing so. This will ensure that you still have editing capabilities over them afterward.

Recommendations

Based on the advantages and differences between the Lock and Flatten features, consider the following points when choosing a workflow for managing your markups.

• Lock the markups if your document is a work in progress. Locked Markups can still be exported and copied. You can also still make changes to them such as replying or changing their status. Continually flattening and unflattening markups is more time-consuming and risky.
• Certain processes and functions will prevent markup recovery permanently when flattening a document. Refer back to Processes that prevent unflattening markups for more information.
• When you're ready to flatten your markups, save a copy of your PDF and flatten that copy. This way you'll always have the original unflattened version in case you need to go back to it.
• As a general rule, if you want to prevent third parties from deleting or modifying your markups, flatten them right before you send out the document, and make sure the Allow Markup Recovery option is disabled in the Flatten menu. See Flattening Markups for more information.
  • If you want even more security as well as an audit trail, you can upload the file to a Studio Session. This also prevents other users from unflattening the file.
• Flattening ensures markups and annotations will display in PDF viewers and mobile apps that only display PDF content and otherwise fail to display the included markups and annotations.
• If you want to search for text in markups, flatten the document. You can't search for text in markups by default.