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There is a similar question, but the answers fail to solve the problem of "flattening" annotations, i.e. turning them from annotations into actual content.

One way is to print them to PDF, but that can result in a loss of quality, especially of scanned images in the PDF. Is there a way to achieve this, preferably using a Linux command line tool like pdftk that can preserve everything in the PDF as-is and only adds the annotations as content?

Community
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Thomas W.
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3 Answers3

4

The accepted answer on the same question, How can I totally flatten a PDF in Mac OS on the command line? seems to work for me to "bake in" or "flatten" PDF annotations as PDF content:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/default -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=out.pdf input_with_annots.pdf

... and it even seems to preserve the annotation text (so it is copypastable, along with the original text content).

Tested this on Ubuntu 14.04, Ghostscript gs --version 9.10.

sdaau
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3

The best solution I’ve found so far: Open the PDF file in Evince and “Print to File”.

Screenshot of Evince’s Print dialog, with “Print to File” selected

Socob
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0

Here is @sdaau's answer updated for Ubuntu 24.04 gs --version 10.02.1:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/default -dPreserveAnnots=false -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=out.pdf input_with_annots.pdf

According to the Ghostscript manual:

-dPreserveAnnots=boolean

We now attempt to preserve most annotations from input PDF files as annotations in the output PDF file

I personally prefer to preserve the links as well:

gs -dQUIET -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf -c "/PreserveAnnotTypes [/Link] def" -f input_with_annots.pdf
Daniel T
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