We create PDFs and send them to different departments through Adobe's shared review system so that our editors and subject matter experts can make revision comments. The Graphic Artists then make revisions and send the PDFs back through for more rounds of review. Each round of review may incur a multitude of comments and there is usually multiple rounds of review. In the end those files need to be 508 Compliant to deliver to our customers so prior to delivery we (GAs) must delete the comments. When we do that Acrobat leaves a stranded Popup and Text Annotation for each comment that was previously in the file. These annotations are not associated to any content in the file nor are they tagged in any way which causes the file to fail the 508 Accessibility Check. To remedy that we (the GAs) have to go in and delete each of those stranded annotations one at a time using the Select Object tool. Since we have so many rounds of review, and therefore many many comments, and therefore a lot of those stranded annotations that need to be deleted manually this takes a LONG time.
Using the PDF optimizer or the Preflight cleanup tool DOES get rid of all the comments and those stranded annotations but it strips out ALL the annotations in the file which means ALL the interactivity is gone. We lose all our hyperlinks and buttons which is obviously not going to work either.
So, my question is this: is there a way to remove ALL the comments from a PDF including their accompanying annotations WITHOUT removing all the interactive elements from a file?
BTW: I’m cross-posting this in the Accessibility AND the Commenting forums here on Adobe.com
Thanks!