Flattening Layers In PDF - How?

October 17, 2008 11:57 AM

Do 3rd party PDF print drivers flatten layers? When printing a PDF from within Photoshop or Illustrator, do 3rd party PDF engines (PDFCreator or CutePDF or other) automatically flatten all the layers? If not, is there a setting in either 3rd party driver to do so?
posted by kartguy to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I just did a couple of tests with the freeware doPDF in both Photoshop and Illustrator (CS2, Windows). In both cases, the resulting PDF had only one layer, and in the photoshop case, the two layers of bitmap were flattened into a single bitmap. There are no settings to change this behavior.
posted by moonmilk at 1:48 PM on October 17, 2008

PDF printers are just virtual printers, they take the ps output of these programs and make PDF. If you want to print layers you can make an action that will print each onto its own sheet. Im not sure if you can write an action to flatten then print, but it sounds like something the app can handle.
posted by damn dirty ape at 2:12 PM on October 17, 2008

I was about to say that I think printing is inherently flattening, but DDA said it in a better way, I think.
posted by rokusan at 6:00 PM on October 17, 2008

damn dirty ape and rokusan are correct: distilling a pdf off any postscript file will produce an unlayered file. If you need a layered file, you can export PDF natively from recent versions of either app
posted by nathan_teske at 6:58 PM on October 17, 2008

Thanks for answers.

I submit PDFs from graphic designers to commercial printers that require "layers to be flattened." I could find no documentation on Adobe site or other sites that the act of creating a PDF actually flattens layers (or creates a single layer).

It seemed to me that a 3rd party PDF print driver would not go to the effort and complexity of maintaining layers in a PDF file. Your answers give me the confidence that is true. Sooo...instead of telling graphic designers to flatten layers before printing to PDF file, I'll just tell them to print to PDF and not even mention layer flattening.
posted by kartguy at 5:58 AM on October 19, 2008