The Same Page

I was recently asked the question "how can we delete or add pages to a PDF file after it has been sent for shared review?". Good question that.

Firstly, a little background: when you send a PDF document to others for a shared review, you may have seen that Acrobat 9 (and 8) will lock the document down to prevent changes. This is to protect the "Enable for Commenting in Reader" functionality in the document from being accidentally removed or "damaged": this way, those who only have the free Adobe Reader 8 or 9 can participate as expected. And hence, you are unable to change pages.

In order to add or delete pages in this scenario, you have to end the shared review, and then start a new one with the modified document. This is good practice: it ensures all reviewers are looking at and adding comments to precisely the same file, helping the review go along much smoother. The Review Tracker in Acrobat 9 can help with ending a shared review, then starting a new one with the same reviewers.

If you don't have access to the original document, or you were not the initiator, you can still use the PDF document that was part of the shared review (the one that Acrobat created when you stepped through the "Send for Shared Review" wizard). You need to "disconnect" that local copy from the Shared Review. You can do so by choosing File > Save as Archive Copy... or by clicking on the server status button on the yellow shared review information bar at the top of the document and choosing "Save as Archive Copy..."

Acrobat will warn you that archiving the document means it is no longer part of a shared review, but that it will still contain all the comments that were added up to that point in an editable state.

Open that archive copy, which by default will have "_archive" appended to its file name. That may not be the one you see in Acrobat once you save the archived version - that is still the shared review document. And as you will notice, the archive version has no more shared review functionality, and therefore, no more security as a result of the enable for Adobe Reader. You are now free to go about doing what you need to do this copy of the PDF document.