Sunday, August 25, 2013

Printing with Annotations in Acrobat with Electronic Filing System (EFS) resulted in weird upside down behaviour

Client from a law firm called and my tech guys has troubleshoot this issue for 1-hr but they can't figure a resolution. As such, it's transferred to me, and after my 30-min diagnosis, I realized the problem has to do with the PDF version on the document!


After 2-hrs of troubleshooting, I can only offer a work-around.

The issue is that EFS annotation tool supports only PDF version 1.5 (for acrobat 7.0 and above). It does not support Adobe PDF version 1.3 (for acrobat 5.0). 

As such, when the user tries to annotate on a scanned document, which Fuji Xerox [Apeosport iv - c3300] uses PDF version 1.3, it will give an upside down or weird issue where the document gets upside down, while the stamp or annotated words stays upright.

after scanning from copier-scanner



the problem with the annotation, it's upright
while the document is upside down





















There is no fix to this as the copier can only generate an older PDF version of the document. I spoke with the FX engineer and she advised that the only solution is to upgrade firmware of copier, which might not resolve the issue as it does not include upgrading the PDF version.

I taught the user to try using Docuworks, scan in document, then re-print to PDF. Too many steps and too lengthy of a process. In the end we just stick with re-saving the scanned PDF document to a ‘newer’ version of a PDF document, before annotating and then, re-saving it again with the annotations.


in the event where the scanned pdf is upgraded.

this is a working example.