Flatten multiple PDF files automatically in Acrobat

The Tip of the Night for January 14, 2023 discussed how to remove hyperlinks from PDFs being filed with a court.

'Flattening' a PDF is a common step to take before filing a document electronically in order to ensure that forms on the PDF can't be subsequently altered. Courts usually view writing a PDF file to a new PDF as being sufficient to flatten the document. On its web page entitled, 'Flattening a Fillable PDF', the Second Circuit instructs e-filers to print out court filings to new PDFs in Acrobat.

Likewise the site of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has a page entitled, "How to Flatten PDF Forms", that recommends flattening filings the same way.

See the sites of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi ("What is 'Flattening a PDF?"); the United States District Court for the Western District of New York ("How to Flatten a PDF File or Form for Filing in CM/ECF"); and the United States District Court for the North District of Texas ("Flattening a PDF File").

But writing a PDF to a new PDF file, will not necessarily remove all of the links in the PDF. You can however use an option under the Preflight function in Acrobat, named 'flatten annotations and form fields' which will remove all of the links in a PDF, without doing a conversion to tiff image format as discussed in the January 14, 2023 tip. In my testing this method removes links in the footers of PDFs, which simply writing a file to a new PDF file will not.

We can also set up this function in an Adobe action to process multiple PDFs by following the below steps, which is a big advantage over the approach used on the courts' web sites.

1. Create a new action and select 'Preflight' under the 'Document Processing' menu from the list of tools on the left.

2. Under the 'Acrobat Pro DC 2015 Profiles' pick the option for 'Flatten annotations and form fields'.

3. Set the processed PDFs to be outputted to a new folder:

4. Add a save function to the action:

You'll be able to use this action to remove the links from multiple PDF files which have been prepared for filing.