Taming the Wild West of PDF mark-up

Out with the old – in with the new! Goodbye, reams of paper mark-up. Goodbye, squiggly little proofreading symbols. Goodbye, Tipp-Ex and Post-it notes. The new era has arrived!

Okay, so it’s been arriving for a while now. This isn’t exactly news. But it is a call to arms. Shedding old ways of working is essential for the evolution of publishing practices and – let’s face it – the global pandemic and homeworking sealed the fate of the paper-proof workflow.

Enter PDF mark-up! With a multitude of mark-up tools, the power of automated functions and utilities, and the ability to share content and collaborate in real-time, digital proofreading is a dream come true …

Or is it? From fiddly corrections, messy pages, errors and missed changes to magically moving mark-ups, cluttered and confusing instructions, and PDFs crashing midway through a job – life in this ‘new era’ isn’t all plain sailing.

Marking changes on PDF proofs, most commonly using Adobe Acrobat, has become the new standard. And with a new standard come new rules. ‘But who’s making the rules?’ I hear you ask. Well, that’s the thing – everyone’s sort of making them up as they go along. With predictably mixed results.

Marking changes in Acrobat is deceptively easy. Choose your favourite tool, explain your change and move on. But what happens next? Was your choice the best method for the rest of the workflow?

Where once we had best practice standards, designed by industry professionals with oversight of the whole publishing workflow and upheld by the British Standards Institution (BSI), now we have a hotchpotch of approaches from self-taught professionals, eager to use the technology but unclear how their choices impact the wider workflow. Let’s take a step back for a moment.

What is PDF mark-up and why do we do it?

If we work in a team, we often mark up changes that someone else will make. That person may be sitting next to us or they may be on the other side of the world. How well we communicate our intentions is key to the quality of the proofs we will get back.

Of course, there is no single correct way to mark up a change. But there are implications – for you, your colleagues, the content, and your schedule and budget. Opting to use the sticky note or highlight tools because they are easy to access or peppering the page with text boxes, freehand pen drawings or, worse, BSI stamps, might seem efficient, but the resulting mark-up can be confusing and laborious to implement.

Understanding how our colleagues work and respecting their time and process will produce better results, ensuring changes are taken in quickly, accurately and cost-effectively.

Do you know what you don’t know?

As someone who learns by doing, I appreciate the value of teaching myself a new skill. But the risk with this is that I then don’t know what I don’t know. When teaching students how best to mark up PDFs, I start by asking about their experience using Acrobat. Those who have been using the tools for several years usually feel pretty confident but often find they didn’t know the implications of their choices. Why a particular method or tool is better (or worse) in a given scenario. Why a designer won’t be able see a change they have made or could be confused by what they mean. Why using specific tools can halve (or double!) the time taken to make changes to the design files.

Keeping pace with changes

In 2019, Adobe introduced a feature that means text changes in Acrobat can automatically be applied in InDesign. It’s a game-changer, hugely reducing the time needed to take in changes and cutting the risk of errors. Are most teams using this feature? No. Because few people know it exists or how to work to enable the functionality.

And that’s the thing about technology – it keeps changing. In 2022, Acrobat launched collaborative workflows, which enable multiple people to view, comment and reply on a single PDF, in real-time. This is another game-changer, allowing the whole team to efficiently share and discuss changes. In 2023, Acrobat’s interface underwent a major overhaul, completely altering the way we access (and think about) the commenting tools. While it might take some getting used to, like any change, the potential is for much quicker and more efficient access to the tools we need.

With Acrobat and InDesign so widely used, it’s essential to keep abreast of these changes, sharing our experiences and ideas with our colleagues, and setting out the new standards. We need to understand the potential of the software and the digital workflow (as well as the limitations) and the implications of the choices we make.

But it’s not enough for some of us to be working one way and others another way. As an industry, we need a systematic, standardised approach. The real benefits will come when there is a sea change across publishing, ensuring our teams, internal and external, work in synchrony.