Your PDF Files May Show More About You Than You Expect
You may or may not realize that when you export a PDF file out of InDesign, it saves more than just what your file looks like. For example, if you have used InDesign’s File > File Info feature to add metadata (your name, file description, keywords, etc.), that information is passed on to the PDF. Viewers can then see that by choosing File > Document Info in Acrobat.
This turns out to be really useful in some situations (for example, it can save having to add that info manually in Acrobat each time you make a PDF). However, it can also be a cause of some embarassment if you wrote something in there that you didn’t expect or want readers to see.
I also just found another, somewhat more annoying bit of information that InDesign may save in your PDF file. If you enable Create Tagged PDF in the Export Adobe PDF dialog box, InDesign saves your paragraph style names, too! Whatever names you decided to use in InDesign appear in Acrobat’s Tags panel (View > Navigation Panels > Tags). Granted, it’s somewhat hidden, but if you’re working on a job that you really don’t like, and you decided to name your styles accordingly… well, I’m just sayin’…
Now, you might say, “well just don’t use Create Tagged PDF, but it turns out that that feature is actually very useful — in fact, necessary, if you’re going to be creating PDFs accessible to people with disabilities or for mobile devices. More on that topic to come in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, I just wanted people to be aware that what’s in your InDesign document can sometimes leak out into the real world.
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Branislav Milic just pointed out to me an interesting follow-up to this post: If you have some text in a text frame, and even a little bit of that text frame intersects a part of the page that will be in the PDF, then the text gets included.
This could cause problems if, for example, you make a text frame for the slug area, and you put private information in that frame. Now you export the PDF. That private info may show up in the final PDF if the bottom of the text frame was too tall and overlapped the page even a little bit.
Along the same lines, if you’re delivering HTML via the Export for Dreamweaver command, all your style names (para, chara, table, cell, and object) are preserved as CSS style classes, if you choose Empty CSS Declarations in the Export dialog box.
Wow, that’s good to know. No more bad-mouthing customers in parts of the files we thought they’d never see anyway… I wonder if there’s an alternative ;)
Not that I would do such a thing, but I remember seeing some xhtml and css code before where the person who coded it had all sorts of profanities for the tags. I guess some people get a kick or justification out of doing this…
Darn, no more erotic fiction lying on the pasteboard and slightly overlapping the page!
I actually find this a very useful feature. A number of clients will often change the filename of the low-rez pdf’s I send them to match their own filing system. In doing so they are removing my docket number off the pdf. So when they send me a pdf months later and say “let’s revise this ad for the next insertion”, well, they’ve removed my dkt number.
No problem I say, I just look in the pdf properties and lo and behold, there’s my original InDesign file name for me to reference. This saves me alot of time as I don’t need to go thru my archives.