

Because the form fields are named identically, the Combine Files gives error: Hello! I need to combine a number of Acrobat Reader Extended PDF forms - filled in by clients - into a single combined PDF with the form fields flattened. If your forms were digitally signed by the person who filled them in then all this would be moot, as every possible change would be detectable.

None of those things are possible with bitmaps. PDFs are searchable, they can be digitally encrypted, they are accessibility-compliant and you can control who opens them with DRM. You don't turn it into a screenshot - as that would also be editable to anyone with Photoshop and the changes would be completely undetectable. If you want to stop someone with Acrobat Pro from making edits to a PDF file, you apply security to it. Turning something into a bitmap is called rasterising, and to Acrobat it makes no sense as part of a forms workflow, as the end result is no longer a PDF file. The PDF file remains editable in Acrobat Pro, because that's what Acrobat Pro is designed to do. Flattening does not merge layers, it does not combine text an image objects, it does not create outlines. It refers to the process of turning annotations and markup into regular page content nothing more, nothing less. Would you be able to share the original PDF file? If you don't want to share publicly, you can email it to me directly - my contact information is on my profile page (click on my name in blue just above this comment)."Flattening" has a very specific meaning in PDF, and you're not using the term properly. Do you see a difference in the output quality between the two? I assume you are using the "editable text and images" option (otherwise Acrobat should not modify the content of your page).

There are two or three different output modes you can use with OCR (how many depends on how you start the OCR process): You should have searchable image (potentially with the "exact" option) and editable text and images. I am just making assumptions about it's internal behavior based on what I've seen. Only Adobe would be in a position to give a definitive answer. Without knowing how exactly Acrobat determines the skew angle, it's impossible to say what exactly is causing this problem. If all text is going "up hill", then it's pretty obvious that you have a skew and Acrobat can then determine the angle and correct for that. The best way to do that is by looking how text behaves in your document. Acrobat needs something to figure out by how much a page is skewed.
