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Hi
I am working in Preview using text boxes to annotate a pdf. When I Save, Quit and reopen, most of the annotations are lost. Really frustrating.
I see this question coming back repeatedly over the years but without an answer. This seems a pretty basic requirement, and given that it's been an issue for years, would be odd if Apple hadn't addressed somehow.
Does anyone have a fix?
Thanks
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 12.1
Hi James
The inspector shows me this - so indeed it's locked. I received the pdf from a 3rd party - a form I need to fill in and send back. I received via email and downloaded into iCloud before playing with it.
On further experimentation, I found that if I made an annotation, and then immediately closed the file, it would save the annotation. I repeated this several times and it appeared to work. It also seemed to work whether I created the annotation through the Tools menu, or copied and pasted a previous one. If I copied several annotations quickly and then saved, then this also worked. But if I had the document open a while, and made multiple changes over a period, and then closed the document, then they largely disappeared. So it appears to me there is a time-element to this - working quickly and closing often appeared to help.
Not a particularly convenient workaround, but may help others a little.
thanks
Hi James
The inspector shows me this - so indeed it's locked. I received the pdf from a 3rd party - a form I need to fill in and send back. I received via email and downloaded into iCloud before playing with it.
On further experimentation, I found that if I made an annotation, and then immediately closed the file, it would save the annotation. I repeated this several times and it appeared to work. It also seemed to work whether I created the annotation through the Tools menu, or copied and pasted a previous one. If I copied several annotations quickly and then saved, then this also worked. But if I had the document open a while, and made multiple changes over a period, and then closed the document, then they largely disappeared. So it appears to me there is a time-element to this - working quickly and closing often appeared to help.
Not a particularly convenient workaround, but may help others a little.
thanks
First a few questions:
PDF files coming from someone else may have security restrictions enabled. Open one of the problematic PDF files and click Tools and Show Inspector and go to the middle tab to view the permissions. If Annotations are restricted you will need the password on the PDF to change that permission. One of the main selling points to PDF technology is the ability to restrict how the files are used. This makes sense for many business documents where you wouldn't want someone replacing a company logo, or copying confidential information, etc.
I've had zero problems saving annotations to PDFs that I create myself. But I have definitely run into PDFs from a 3rd party that are encrypted and restricted with various permissions. In recent years, Apple added support for encryption and these restrictions where previously these files didn't work at all.
Thanks for the response. Will check out your advice James and see where it takes me.
Preview does not save annotations
