Hack 61 Copy Features from One PDF to Another

Restore bookmarks, annotations, and forms after refrying your PDF.

You just refried your high-fidelity PDF [Hack #60] to create a lightweight, online edition and Distiller burned off the nifty PDF navigation features and forms. Let's combine the old PDF's navigation features and forms with the new PDF's pages to get a lightweight, interactive PDF. Here's how:

Open the old PDF file (the one with the bookmarks, links, or form fields) in Acrobat.
In Acrobat 6, select Document Pages Replace. In Acrobat 5, select Document Replace Pages from the menu.
A file selector dialog opens. Select the new PDF file (the one with no PDF features).
The Replace Pages dialog opens, requesting which pages to replace. Enter the first and last page numbers of your document.
When it is done, select Save As . . . to save the resulting PDF into a new file.
Test the resulting PDF to make sure all your interactive features came through successfully.

Using the Replace Pages feature like this to separate the visible page from its interactive features can be pretty handy. If you ever need to transfer a page and its interactive features, use the Extract Pages, Insert Pages, and Delete Pages functions.