Lines, objects, and text from many programs are retained when exporting/printing to a PDF. These assets are “pressed” (Flattened) onto a page and can’t be selected or modified without using specialized “Edit PDF Content” tools (We made a tutorial for this a couple of years ago. Here’s a link: https://ddscad.com/edit-pdf-content-with-bluebeam-revu).

Before sharing official correspondence and/or submitting documents to municipalities, it’s imperative that we flatten our markups, measurements, images, and other data in order to prevent them from being easily modified. While we’re able to quickly flatten markups, proper utilization of the “Flatten Dialog” allows us to flatten categories of markups on multiple pages. Likewise, we can allow our markups to be “Unflattened” via Markup Recovery.

Flattening without allowing for Markup Recovery (Unflattening) is a key step related to preparing documents for submittals. For more information, please contact us at info@ddscad.com.