Marks and drawing applications

Why a document that looks the same here and in Illustrator loses every mark going one way, and loses the other program's curves going the other. Neither is a fault; it follows from what a PDF is.

Two kinds of thing in one file

A PDF holds page content, the drawing of the page itself (text, vectors, images), and, separately, annotations: objects attached to the page that a reader may draw, ignore, or strip out.

CaseLeaf's marks are annotations. That is why a highlight is selectable, a rectangle movable, a black-out something you can turn back into an ordinary shape, and every mark something the Marks list can show and a filter can hide. The words under a highlight are exactly the words that were there before it.

A drawing application does not work this way. Illustrator opens a PDF by importing its content and rewriting the file from what it read. It never reads the annotations at all.

What that costs, both ways

Marks made here do not survive being opened in Illustrator and saved back. The saved copy comes back with no annotations. Every mark is gone, because none of them was part of what Illustrator imported.

A curve Illustrator draws is not an editable mark here. Its lines are in the page's content, so to CaseLeaf they are part of the page, like the printed text, not a mark laid over it.

The bridge, one way only

Making marks permanent crosses the gap from this side: it draws every mark into the page's content, which is what a drawing application reads. The price is the same as the purpose: a mark made permanent is content now, and cannot be moved, recoloured or taken off the page. A document is either marked up and editable here, or flattened and readable everywhere; Make Marks Permanent turns the first into the second, and there is no way back.

The other direction, lifting a drawing application's paths out of a page's content and turning them into marks, is not something CaseLeaf does.

See also

• What is written into the file
• Making marks permanent
• Blacking out

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