Comment rescue
Keep your comments. Move them to a healthy PDF
You have an old PDF with comments that are still live, but you no longer want to rely on that file as the base. At the same time you can generate a new, healthy PDF from the correct InDesign document.
What's failing
Sometimes repairing the problematic PDF isn't worth it. The comments are still valuable, but the file that holds them may have lost internal information, passed through unreliable tools, or simply stopped being the best base to return to InDesign.
What IMC does
It uses the new, healthy PDF as the base and moves the old PDF's live comments to it. Instead of rebuilding the problematic container, IMC keeps the new export and recovers onto it the review layer that can still be moved.
- You provide the old PDF with its live comments.
- You provide a healthy PDF, freshly exported from the correct
.indd. - IMC moves the comments and verifies correspondence and geometry.
- You receive the healthy PDF with the moved comments and a report of the result.
An example
Old PDF
Problematic PDF · 237 live comments
Result
Healthy PDF + moved comments, with a count of copied and non-movable ones
How far it goes
- The two PDFs must keep sufficient correspondence: the transplant relies on pages and geometry — it doesn't yet verify that both versions' text is identical.
- If pages, layout or content have changed significantly, some comments may need review or not be movable.
- It can't recover comments that are already flattened or destroyed.
Your files
This operation needs the old commented PDF and a freshly exported healthy PDF. Both are uploaded over a secure connection and processed on a server. The process is kept for 30 days, with its files and its results, so you can continue it, and you can delete it earlier whenever you want. How we handle your files.
Transplant your comments
We'll open "Your editorial process" with the transplant already selected.
Transplant my commentsFirst you check the result for free. If everything is fine, you pay and download the full file.